Life between my first memory and my first murder blurred together like a hideous mosaic assembled by some lunatic using pieces of his own hardened vomit. Predictably, it was ugly.
The first few chunks of that depraved picture were set in place when I reached my fourth year. My foster parents, ever joking to their friends about my tempestuous nature, did not have the intuition to predict what I would do when left unsupervised in a playroom with the neighbors’ baby. It was only for five minutes, they reasoned, but for three of those minutes Donovan stared at me. Smiling and drooling, with no idea that Fate was about to use him as my first training exercise, the infant, two years my junior, tap, tap, tapped his rattle against his podgy thigh, hypnotizing me with his baby blues. I wanted to see how they worked. So I took them. Or tried.
I don’t know what became of baby Donovan after my distraught foster mother tore my bloody fingers away from him. I never saw her again after that day.
Finding new parents was almost impossible after that, but between seasons at various children’s homes, I occasionally passed to new guardians under increasingly strict regulations. But the harder they pressed upon my will, the more I pushed back, and knowing that my goddess had reserved a special place for me in her heart, I drove social workers and child psychologists to near insanity with every new incident. I don’t regret a single moment of those years. Fate forged me for the passions to come.
At the age of ten, they inflicted me upon the children’s division of Kettlewhite Mental Institution. And it was only in there, amongst the truly insane who had no life in their eyes, that I realized I had to tame my urges if I wanted to serve Fate properly. I wept convincing tears of remorse after each violent episode, performed well in group activities, and responded properly to the Rorschach tests—a butterfly instead of a torn throat, a flower instead of a cudgeled head—until I seeped into their favor and gained their trust. They released me back into the wild to new parents and to grammar school. I sat at the rear of the class, absorbing the insults and isolation, a tamed wolf circling the sheep, waiting for Fate to point out the strays from the flock.
I remember my first killing as though the images had been tattooed on the inside of my eyelids. At sixteen, learning to fulfil my calling as an outcast, I spent as much time alone as I could, and on that particular day, I decided to pay a visit to the banks of the stagnant pond in the woods near my school. I liked to go there before returning home; it was a good place for contemplation—a metaphor for my mind. I loved to stare at the green scum that covered the surface, thinking about how so many people had no idea what lay beneath the murky depths of the child they thought they knew.
An old tree overhung the still water, and from one of the thickest branches someone had tied a swing to it. I sat on it, pushed myself from the bank, and listened to the soft creaking of the rope as it swung back and forth.
Ten minutes passed before someone called from the bank, “Hey! Queer boy, I want a word.”
I craned my neck round to see. Graham Adams had his hands on his hips, puffed-out leathers, and a ridiculous quiff-rendered hairstyle that underlined him as a joke, so I laughed.
“Think it’s funny to upset my sister, do you?”
A pathetic fourteen-year-old girl in a pink dress playing hopscotch with her equally nauseating friends—she deserved what she got. When I saw her satchel by the classroom door I swiped it, emptied the contents into the yard, gulped down her packed lunch, then spat a healthy lump of doughy mucus into the empty bag. If any of the other boys in my year had done that, it would probably have earned him a laugh but not me. I got beaten up there and then by the Neanderthals in the year above me, laughing hysterically with the contact of each fist and boot. But obviously that wasn’t good enough for goody-two-shoes Graham. He decided to take it upon himself to pay me a private visit—the biggest mistake he could have made.
“You coming off that swing, or am I going to have to kick you off?”
I lifted one hand to my mouth and gasped in mock surprise at his threat. Then I laughed again.
Graham marched over to the tree, flushed with anger, and pulled the ropes. As the swing juddered to the bank, I fell from it into the mud, still laughing even as the first crack of knuckles jarred my cheek. Another punch followed as Graham’s knees pressed my arms into the wet soil, and then my fingers were at his throat, searching for the hard lump of his Adam’s apple. He shuffled out of my reach, stood up, and spat at me as I lay breathless with the water of the pond icy against the back of my head.
“Wanker!” He spat again and turned to leave.
“At least I don’t have a slut for a sister,” I said.
Graham turned, anger pulsing blood through his cheeks as he drew a fist back to punch me again. But I was already up, energized and exhilarated by the thrill of the fight, rushing at him, arms reaching for the throat. I felt his fist graze the side of my head making my ear ring, but my thumbs had found the target this time.
I expect he thought this was just a fight until my crazed scream and the violent pressure I used against his windpipe made him change his mind very quickly. We rolled against the bank, him paddling against my face and chest, then pinching and scratching in desperation, me pressing harder and harder as if I were trying to thumb a hole into a steel bar, and suddenly we were flailing in the water. I saw a flash of my parents’ killer’s face against the carpet with blood creeping beside his matted hair. I almost let go of Graham’s neck with the shock of that vision, but it was too late anyway—my arms were the only ones moving and his body was limp beneath the water.
I wrenched the face from the water and stared into his glassy eyes for almost two minutes before the burning pain in my muscles forced me to drop him back in.
I screamed.
Not from fear or horror. I screamed because frustration and pleasure swirled inside me like oil and water. Something about the eyes of that corpse moved me, as if I had missed the most important moment of my life, as if I had blinked and missed the Second Coming but seen the rising of the dead in glory. That was my first kill. But I knew I needed more.