The meth dealers above us radiated their presence to my mind like flickering lights in the darkness. Their past violence and desire to kill us triggered something in me that made me feel like I wasn’t entirely in control of my actions anymore. All there was, was the need to act. Reaching over to a nearby cardboard box, I picked up a ball of piano wire sitting on top of the broken piano and started unspooling it around my hands. The piano wire bit into my flesh but the tiny cuts healed around it, creating a crisscross of flesh that felt oddly good.
“Uh, Carrie, what is your brother doing?” Nancy asked.
“Oh, he’s just got the eye of the tiger,” Carrie said. “I bet he’s sensing prey. It’s what our Dad looked like whenever he saw an innocent young twenty-something. In William’s case, it’s a bunch of the local thugs. One of them used to beat his girlfriend and his kid so I’d like to call dibs.”
I paused at the base of the stairs, pulling out from my fugue enough to respond. “There’s no dibs in murder, Carrie.”
“Dibs is an ancient and irrevocable law!” Carrie said.
“We’re being attacked?” Nancy said, holding her ax tightly.
“Yep,” Carrie said. “I guess none of them are your type of prey. So sorry, better luck next crime.”
“Could you not call them that?” Nancy said.
“What? Prey?” Carrie asked.
“Yes,” Nancy hissed, unhappy.
“Why?” Carrie asked.
Nancy glared.
“Oh, right, that thing that happened to you,” Carrie said, nodding. “My bad.”
“Bloooooood,” the vampire beside them said, managing to lift one of its bony skeletal arms.
“You hush,” Carrie said. “We’ll get to you in a minute.”
I slowly began to creep up the stairs, thinking about how profoundly creepy this whole thing must be to Nancy and whether I should tell her to just run away while she still could. Perhaps there wasn’t much difference between me and the bored rich idiots who were engaged in their version of The Most Dangerous Game other than who we targeted.
That’s a fairly huge difference, Carrie spoke in my mind. It’s like people love dogs and hate rats. Mind you, the social acceptability of murdering animals can vary from place to place as well as change. Cows in India vs. cows in America for example. Also, pigeons used to be beloved pets and now they’re the rednecks of the sky.
Carrie? I asked.
Yeah, bro? Carrie replied.
Let me handle this, please, I replied, slowly ascending the stairs like a ghost.
Just remember, ancient laws of dibs on the spouse and child abuser! Carrie said. You’d be giving me blue balls if I had balls.
We really need to talk about appropriate conversation topics between siblings when we have time, I replied.
Sure, we can take a bath together and discuss it, Carrie said.
Okay, now you’re doing it deliberately, I said.
What? Me? No! Carrie said. Besides, I’m rooting for you and Nancy Loo Who. I’ve think she thinks you’re creepy but hot. Which is one-half very promising.
I didn’t know how I felt about that. I really liked Nancy, but my lifestyle was not conducive to any kind of long-lasting emotional relationship.
Then have a short-term one! Carrie said. You only live as many times as it takes to finally kill you.
I really hoped Nancy wasn’t listening in on this. Signing off, Carrie. I need to focus.
May the great spirit of slashers everywhere be with you, Carrie said. Right now, she’s telling me about some winter-appropriate murder weapons down here.
I didn’t respond, instead slowly opening the basement door as I listened to the people moving around the house on the first floor.
“Alright, Earl, Jimbo, you check the upstairs. James, Karl, and I will go through this part of the house. Esteban, I want you to check the basement,” the leader of the group spoke. He was one of the ones I’d seen earlier in my vision.
“You got it, Wilbur,” One of the others spoke. Somehow, I knew it was Karl Johnson, a man who had once beaten a man to death for coming on to him.
“Wait, we’re splitting up?” A third voice spoke. I knew his name was Jimbo Jones listening to his sin. He killed the child upstairs. “Haven’t any of you yokels seen a horror movie in your lives?”
“This ain’t a horror movie,” Wilbur Packard spoke. “Just some townies who are interfering with business. I remind you that you were the idiot who sold this house because you thought our boss wanted to kill us for dipping too much into the product. Turns out the Irishman just wanted us to make up the losses next quarter.”
I’d wondered why the previous owners had sold the house so cheaply. Disregarding the fact they weren’t the actual owners, it seemed they’d had a scare with either their supplier or most frequent customer. Either way, it seemed fate had put me in this position, and it was now up to me to make the best use I could of it.
I creeped out past the basement door and shut it behind me without making a noise. It was strange because the door had creaked loudly before. Maybe there was some subtle slasher magic at work or, perhaps, I was just getting lucky. Either way, I crouched down and slowly moved around the house from corner to corner with the furniture providing cover.
Dad had made us play hide and seek with a religious devotion, burning my flesh with cigarettes every time he managed to spot us. He’d also done the same to losers of any game, regardless of how well we’d done. I’d allowed myself to get found deliberately in order to protect Carrie, though she was astoundingly good at finding me anyway.
I managed to get into the living room where the fire had mostly died out. I placed myself behind the couch, which gave me a view of the intruders. They were very similar to my vision, a bunch of nearly identical white men, with a single exception in a long-haired man almost seven feet in height. He had a pock-marked and tanned skin with some Mexican heritage. Diego Estevan, I assumed. There was something else about him that made me worried, a miasma of otherworldly power that made me wonder if he’d been dipping into the vampire blood they were harvesting from their creature below.
“This isn’t a horror movie, Wilbur? Christ, you do know where we live, right?” Jimbo said. “My next-door neighbor growing up was the Hookman. Guy would carve up hitchhikers for his wife’s diner.”
“So you keep saying,” Wilbur said, clearly not believing this was a town full of serial killers. There was a cracking noise that sounded like someone hitting a man in the face with a rifle butt. “Now get upstairs or I’ll do a hell of a lot worse to you. Estevan, make sure our golden goose is still laying eggs.”
“He’s a man,” Estevan said.
“You know what I mean!” Wilbur said.
With that, the group broke up and started to go in various directions. Wilbur’s crew were the ones to watch as he went with his group and Estevan into the kitchen while Jimbo and Earl headed up the stairs. Thankfully, none of them headed my way, though I didn’t think there was enough light for them to see me in the dark anyway.
Only two of the meth dealers had lanterns, Jimbo and Wilbur respectively having electric ones attached to their pants, and they were providing only a tiny amount of light. There was a half-moon outside and almost zero cloud cover, but that didn’t mean much as little was streaming in through the house’s curtained windows.
The lack of power in the house was proving to my advantage. One of the earliest lessons my father had taught me was to cut the power to any place before you went on a killing spree. Another was to cut the phone lines, though the era of cell phones meant that was no longer foolproof. Supposedly, you could go down to any electronics store and buy a cellphone jammer, but I hadn’t made that investment yet.
“Stay calm, stay safe,” I mouthed to myself as I waited for the right moment to move. Once the first-floor dealers were out of visual range and I heard the ones upstairs start to enter the rooms there, I moved up the side of the staircase. I clung to the wall in order to make sure the steps creaked less as there was more support along the edges.
I could hear a half-dozen hearts beating throughout the house as the need to kill took me over. I heard every little awful thing the group had done, and it was hard to concentrate as they all distracted me. Instead, I focused on the ones directly above me. Their hearts drowned out the others and I eventually focused on Earl, who trailed behind Jimbo.
Earl Jones was Jimbo’s cousin and the weakest of the pack. He had done terrible things both to men as well as women, but always with someone there to hold his hand. His weakness was not physical but mental. In his desire to fit in, he’d do anything and had done so in hopes of winning their respect. I could see the metaphorical splotches of blood from all his crimes glow on his hands, shoulders, and face. The worst deed he’d ever done was drug a girl he’d known from school and sold her to the mysterious Irishman they’d mentioned. He didn’t know what happened to her, but it didn’t matter, did it? I was surprised Carrie hadn’t called dibs on him as well.
“So, this is where you killed that kid, huh?” Earl asked, moving into the children’s bedroom of the house.
“Shut the hell up, Earl, I don’t want to hear it,” Jimbo said. “I did what Wilbur ordered me to do. We needed a place to stay and the family was in the way.”
“Hey man, I’m not judging,” Earl said, trying to save face. “It was hardcore. You did what you had to do.”
“Screw you,” Jimbo said, clearly not comfortable having his worst act brought up. “Go check the bathroom.”
“But it’s dark, man!” Earl said.
“I said check the bathroom!” Jimbo said.
I didn’t need to be told twice that the upstairs bathroom was the best location for stalking my prey. It was a ratty looking location with a white tile floor, an utterly unsanitary toilet with mold growing in its bowl, and a cracked mirror. There were no curtains over its tiny window, so the moonlight streamed in brightly despite Earl’s claims. The door opened inward and I slipped behind it, holding my breath so it wasn’t too ajar.
“Jackass,” Earl muttered, heading into the bathroom. “I don’t know what he thinks I’m going to find in here. It’s not like people are going to be hiding in here. Did it occur to Wilbur that maybe they had two cars and are in town? They probably came to this hellhole to survey it or took one look then hopped over to Silverton in order to stay at the Best Western.”
Silverton was the proverbial next town over where we’d have to do our shopping tomorrow. It was also the place where we’d bought Nancy her Burger King. I presumed that was where most of the meth dealers originally came from since it had a population of at least six thousand and was an actual community.
I could hear Earl’s heart beating in front of the door and knew he was staring at the mirror. He turned around to leave as I slipped out and wrapped the piano wire around his throat before pulling it tight. I overdid it and sliced through his throat, causing blood to drip down his shirt before moving my arm to break his neck in one easy motion. I was stronger than an average human being and what would have taken extensive training was almost all too easy.
It was all too easy.
Unsatisfying even.
I accidentally broke the piano wire in my hands by pulling it too hard, an unconscious expression of frustration. While I’d wanted to kill Charles Devinshire quickly and stealthily, this felt wrong. Earl Jones had died without knowing who was coming after him, why, or for what reason. Even if it was against all the laws of sense, it was important that he not just die but die in a way that made the act meaningful. God, suddenly so much about slashers made sense. We were puppets to rituals that I didn’t understand and wasn’t sure I wanted to.
Now you’re getting it, the Spirit of the Hunt whispered. It usually takes other slashers eight or nine kills to understand. Still, you popped your cherry and that calls for a reward.
I don’t want your reward— I thought back, only to feel an agonizing pain on my left hand as the feeling of my father’s cigarettes was felt only a thousand times worse. I went into shock for a second or I would have screamed out. There, branded into my hand, was an I. No, wait, not an eye, but the Roman numeral for one.
The Mark of Cain, the Spirit of the Hunt said. Not all slashers have it, but those that do are marked for something truly special. It means I’m watching them. The mark can be anywhere, but the left hand is a favorite of mine. Do you know the word sinister originally meant left-handed? People believed that lefties had something wrong with them and it came to mean something harmful or evil seeming. 90% of slashers are left-handed. You’re one of the remaining 10% who are ambidextrous.
The Spirit of the Hunt sure was chatty for a diabolical spirit encouraging me to kill. I wondered if she was as personable with other slashers. I thought God gave Cain his mark in order to keep him from being murdered by his relatives for killing Abel.
Don’t believe everything you read, the Spirit of the Hunt said. And no, I’m usually a lot less chatty. You and your sister amuse me. Now get back to murdering.
I tried to shake away the feeling that I’d failed in killing Earl. Not because I’d given into the killing urge, but I’d done so quickly and without flourish. My sister probably would have said that made me like a teenage boy, but I disliked that comparison. Sex and murder were not similar despite how many killers got off on the latter. The only thing they had in common was that they were both primal urges—at least for slashers.
Reaching down, I pressed my forefinger and index finger into the late Earl’s throat wound and gathered up blood like finger-paint. I proceeded to write the words SINS PAID IN FULL on the mirror. It was weird but something about the act relaxed me and allowed me to focus on my other prey. I could already imagine the meth dealers coming upstairs, finding the body, and freaking out. It amused me more than I wanted it to.
I wiped my fingers on a dirty hand towel before removing my glasses. The piano wire was useless now and I needed a weapon. Breaking the edges off the glasses’ frames, I turned it into a makeshift shiv before proceeding to the room Jimbo was in. I took up position beside the door and peered inside.
Jimbo was standing in the middle of the room, looking down at the child’s bed covered in blood. The Lego set was missing from the room, but it was still full of stuffed animals and posters of clowns on the wall. Apparently, the child had been unironically fond of the creatures. There was a large octagonal window on the side of the wall, almost the size of a man, with a beautiful view of the moonlit farm beyond. Light was provided by the lantern at his side but also the window, making it an eeriely well-lit chamber.
“I’m sorry, kid,” Jimbo said, continuing to stare at the blood. “I’d say it was just business but that’d be a lie. I was high as a kite, though. Haven’t touched the stuff since.”
His apology briefly moved me before I shook my head. Apologies would not bring his victim back to life and there was no redemption in hell. Besides, it hadn’t stopped him from dealing the substance that drove him to kill, had it? I shook those thoughts away and stalked him from behind.
“Time to pay,” I said, my voice seemingly lowering an octave.
“What the,” Jimbo said, turning around with his gun in hand, only for me to grab it and aim it at the ceiling before it went off. The noise would attract his fellows, but I didn’t care. I drove my glasses into one of his eyes as he screamed a horrific death rattle. From there, I grabbed him by the shirt and threw him like a baseball through the octagonal window. He weighed something like two hundred and fifty pounds but throwing him had been easy. Interesting. I ran to the window and stared down at the ground, seeing the corpse of Jimbo spread out on the ground like a broken doll. It made me feel powerful and I also felt a strange sense of satisfaction from the house itself. Humans left behind ghosts as well, just not as overtly so as the slashers. Either that or I was just trying to justify what I’d done.
Against my years of resistance, I was the Accountant now. There was no turning back.
As if there ever was an option to, the Spirit of the Hunt taunted.
The mark on my hand doubled in size, becoming a Roman two.