I killed a demon. I don’t know if it was really, technically a demon—I’m not exactly a religious person—but I do know that my next-door neighbor was some kind of monster, with fangs and claws and the whole bit. He could change back and forth, and he killed a lot of people, and if he’d known that I knew who he was, he would have killed me too. So for lack of a better word, I called him a demon, and because there was no one else who could do it, I killed him. I think it was the right thing to do. At least the killing stopped.
Well, it stopped for a while.
You see, I’m a monster too—not a supernatural demon, just a messed-up kid. I’ve spent my whole life trying to keep my dark side locked away where it couldn’t hurt anybody, but then that demon showed up, and letting my dark side loose was the only way to stop it. And now I don’t know how to lock it back up.
I call my dark side Mr. Monster: the side that dreams about bloody knives, and imagines what you’d look like with your head on a stick. I don’t have multiple personalities and I don’t hear voices or anything, I just . . . It’s hard to explain. I think about a lot of terrible things, and I want to do a lot of terrible things, and it’s just easier to come to terms with that side of me by pretending it’s someone else—it’s not John who wants to cut his mother into tiny pieces, it’s Mr. Monster. See? I feel better already.
But here’s the problem: Mr. Monster is hungry. Serial killers often talk about a need—some driving urge that they can control at first, but that builds and builds until it’s impossible to stop, and then they lash out and kill again. I never understood what they were talking about before, but now I think I do. Now I can feel it, deep in my bones, as insistent and inevitable as the biological urge to eat or hunt or mate.
I’ve killed once, and it’s only a matter of time before I kill again.