“I have felt the wind on the wing of madness”
—Charles Baudelaire
He lay back on the bed and stretched the muscles of his lean frame. He linked his hands behind his head and stared at the ceiling. Dear God, he’d touched her. His skin crawling against hers. She’d looked at him with that cold gray eye alight with life and trust, all so soon to be snuffed. He had her though and at last he had his plan. He just needed to book the second hire car and get the timing right.
He needed a break. Thank God he could now be alone for a while. The watching was easy, it was the being around her that hurt. The intensity of it all. Keeping the carapace closed and his shutters down. All the fucking time. Sometimes he wanted to lash out or bite her, to feel the soft give of her flesh beneath his teeth. It was all he could do to still his breathing and hush his mind.
He wasn’t happy. It was all starting to get under his skin and that wasn’t right. He wanted to get under their skin—both figuratively and literally—not the other way round. He was just too involved and that wasn’t how he worked. He liked his own company, his own inner world, not this interaction. Not this level of sticky human contact. He wasn’t sleeping and could feel the strain of it stretching him thin. My God, all the kissing, the caring and the just being human, how do they do that? He couldn’t survive in their world.
He was starting to be careless and that wasn’t like him at all. He wondered, could he be ill? For the first time he questioned the wisdom of what he was doing, and the effect it seemed to be having on him.
The other night he’d found himself at the stroke of midnight, stood there in the garden just watching the house. He’d thrown a handful of tiny stones at her window, just for the hot dark hell of it. Then he’d seen her, silhouetted in the moonlight. The white disk of her face and the black pits of her eyes. For a fleeting moment he’d thought his mother was back from the grave and had run terrified into the trees, the branches tearing and ripping at him as he fled. That wasn’t right; that wasn’t him.
He shrugged the memory away for it disturbed him still. He needed to calm himself with the thought of the joys and the pleasures to come. He took the crumpled picture from his pocket, the one that he’d stolen, and began to scrape at the place where those eyes would be. Over and over, until the paper was torn and scarred. She was like a delicious itch that he mustn’t scratch, not yet.
Once Christmas was over he’d strike. When the January dead-zone took its toll on the weak and depressed, he’d strike. Poor Izzy Weir, brain damaged and deserted, no wonder she couldn’t cope. Guilt-racked husband and distraught sisters huddled at the wintery graveside, he could see it all. And when it was over, when the sod had settled over her, he’d come back to comfort the golden twins. He’d take them one by one, those little gilt-y innocents, into his warm embrace.
He pressed his face into the pillow and throbbed and swelled with the thought of it.