He couldn’t understand why they always tried to scream.
Didn’t they know it was pointless? He studied her face. That was his favourite part: the vision of a face contorted thus. He’d yet to find the right term, he just knew that he craved it. Her expression suggested that she was in the middle of some kind of panic attack, like the ones he’d heard about on the radio: apparently schoolgirls have them. Women gossiped about anxiety and the fear it propagated. He eavesdropped on conversations in shops. Though he enjoyed the expression, it always surprised him. Her face had gone from concentration and sexual arousal to this look very quickly, and they hadn’t been here long. He’d picked her up in the Scrag End pub, which wasn’t a place to take a lady, but she didn’t seem to mind.
And she wasn’t a lady.
She’d been excited and turned on by the thought of stopping at the graveyard first. He’d taken her on a stone tomb. She’d looked at him in that way and told him that he could have whatever he wanted. For fifty pounds. The price suited him. It was fairly top-end for these parts, around Ambleside and the like, but she was very nice-looking, and they were to spend the night together after all. He liked them to offer rather than the other way round. It meant they were willing, and less likely to expect what he really wanted. His performance in the cemetery lowered her guard.
He continued to squeeze her throat. She looked quite beautiful, but that was the thing: they never stayed like that. They always got whiney, needy and bossy. This way he could remember her as she was when she did as she was told. This way, she would always do as she was told, and he wouldn’t need to pay.
The woman’s naked body went limp. That would do for now, he thought. He rubbed his hands, needing a break, and sat looking at her a while; her eyes goggled about in her eye sockets, and then she was still. His fingers burned. No matter how much he exercised them, there was always room for improving his stamina. She was laid on a peach-coloured silk throw that he’d placed lovingly on his bed. The room was decorated sparsely but it was warm, cosy and decent enough for a whore.
She didn’t seem to be stirring, and he panicked: maybe he’d gone too far?
He got up and went to the bathroom to fill a cup with cold water and came back to find her chest going up and down. He drank the water himself and smiled: he hadn’t done it wrong after all. He sat beside her and watched her face, which was peaceful now. He was naked also and he noticed that he was chilly. Had he forgotten to put on the heating? It was the middle of winter and the house was cold. They’d kept warm on this bed, but now he shivered. He’d managed to asphyxiate her three times now, which equalled his personal best. He looked at his watch: he’d been going for thirty-two minutes. Funny how he found it hard to ejaculate when he made regular love to a woman, but now, as she slumbered before him, only slightly labouring for breath, his arousal was almost complete. Now she was weak, he could guarantee that during the final climax, she would submit completely due to fatigue – or what he could only describe from examining her face as fear. She was also growing weak.
When he’d finished, he took his hand off her mouth and lifted her gently off the bed and carried her downstairs, through the kitchen, kicking a door open as he went. The staircase to the lower cellar was narrow, and he manoeuvred the woman over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. Air escaped from her throat and she groaned with each step. He reached the bottom and opened a further door, kneeling down in the dark. The cellar was warm, because he used a heater for them, and was only lit with a dim orange glow from a small bulb suspended from a hook. He already had the keys ready in his hand and, coming to an empty cage, he expertly deposited her to the floor and forced her inside, clicking the lock shut behind her. Inside was a dog mattress, a bottle of water and a blanket – nothing else. He watched for a while as she regained consciousness. He remained on all fours, fully naked still.
Her eyes flickered and settled on him, trying to focus, and she started to try to scream again, but no noise came out. He smiled.
‘That’s better,’ he soothed. Her mouth opened and shut like some great grouper seeking smaller fish to consume. Her eyes were just as wide as the ugly sea creature too.
He’d seen the look in her eyes many times before: it was the type of look that children had when on a scary fairground ride. It was also the look of a man who he’d once seen fall off the platform at Grange-Over-Sands train station, moments before the train arrived and sliced him in two.
It was this look that he sought, and he smiled again. She was going to bring him a lot of pleasure. Still on all fours, he backed away slowly the way he’d come, never taking his eyes off her.
The woman looked around her, desperately trying to force her pupils to adjust to the lighting.
He anticipated her reaction and smiled. Images crept out of the darkness and, one by one, she recognised what they were. Frantically she shook the cage and beat it with her fists. She was a live one. But then she slumped back and closed her eyes, then formed herself into a ball underneath the blanket, and her limbs went flaccid once more. He cast his eye upon the other cages in the cellar, from where no noise emerged, but he wasn’t worried about any sound because of the remoteness of his house. Even if there were passers-by who might get close enough, the women who shared his home with him quickly lost both their ability and urgency to scream.
He stood up now, and took a key from a hook on the wall, locking the cellar door behind him. Turning, he went back up the stairs to find his clothes. Back in his bedroom, he gathered hers up first, putting them into a black plastic bag, throwing it into his wardrobe; then he gathered his own things off the floor, quickly getting dressed. He shivered and went to the cupboard on the landing, opening it and adjusting the heating dial. He spent a fortune on heating this time of year. That’s what had led to the mistake: he’d left the body in a room with the heating up full. He’d drunk too many glasses of red wine and fallen asleep, forgetting that the thermostat had been put up. By the time he’d gone back in the room the next day, she’d already begun to decompose slightly. It was why he’d rushed to get rid of her and now it was all over the news: the body in the bin. He smiled to himself as he grabbed his coat and van keys. It was time to go to work.