CHAPTER TWO

 

 

DARYL WAS FASCINATED by the changes in Mother. In the space of three short months she’d gone from a spritely, if domineering, woman in her early sixties to a wasted, bed-ridden monster. Her body was rail-thin, the flesh hanging like wrapping paper from the gifts of her bones. Her small, nimble hands had lengthened into spiny claws. Her ribs protruded like the bars of a cage beneath the flattened expanse of her chest.

Mother’s (never Mum or Mam or Mummy: such casual abuses of her title were simply not allowed) body was usually covered by sweaty sheets, so Daryl was spared the horror of looking at it every day, but her face remained above the covers, peeking out at him like a monstrous, wide-eyed baby.

Apart from these more apparent ravages, there had also been other, more subtle alterations to her physiognomy: the way her eyes looked glassy, like those of a doll; the waxen feel of her skin; the yellowish pallor of her sunken cheeks. Daryl stood over her now, staring into those black doll’s eyes, wondering if she could still see him, or if she just sensed that he was there, as always, at her side.

“Mother.”

The head stirred, twitching. The eyes widened impossibly – yellow gunk hung in strings from the thin lashes.

“I hate you, Mother.” He smiled, rolling the words around on his tongue. Before her illness, Daryl would never have dared say such things. But now everything was different. Now, for once, he was in charge.

Mother let out a gurgling-rasping sound, as if she were trying to speak. She was in her last days now, which was why she’d been allowed home from hospital to die in her own home. Daryl had fought long and hard with the doctors to send her home, stating mock-sincere arguments for human rights, dignity; the fact that she should be given the choice where she would end her days. In reality, he just wanted her back so that he could torture her, just as she’d done to him his entire life.

Daryl knew that he was a pathetic specimen, a sad excuse for a man – Mother had told him this enough times that it had sunk in deep. But who was the more pathetic, a sick old woman or the son who cared for her?

“Sleep tight, Mother,” he whispered, before turning away and leaving her alone, in the dark. She had always hated the dark, and insisted upon sleeping her entire life with a lamp by the bed. Upon her return from the cancer ward, Daryl had carefully, and in plain sight, removed the light bulbs from every light-fitting in her room. She winced as he smashed them on the floor, fearing both his wanton act of destruction and the darkness it promised. He had replaced the bulbs later, of course, but the act had been wonderfully symbolic.

He crossed the landing and entered his own room, glancing up at the print of one of John Wayne Gacy’s prison paintings that hung on the wall by the door. He’d paid a small fortune for the framed print on eBay; it was one of his prized possessions.

His bookshelves bent under the weight of books on serial killers. The walls were plastered with newspaper cuttings, snips and snaps of unsolved murder cases and abductions. He was surrounded by his heroes, and each night before bed he would slowly leaf through the pages of one of his many scrapbooks, touching the glued-in faces of men like Ted Bundy, Fred West, Dennis Neilson and Albert Fish.

Daryl was intelligent and self-educated enough to realise that a lot of serial killers were mother fixated and possessed limited social skills. He knew that most of them started when they were very young, torturing small animals. What he could not understand was the secret element these killers seemed to have, the factor that made them step forward and live out the fantasy. Although he had been planning his first murder for several years now, Daryl was yet to take that step, to thrust his head above the parapet of normality and seize the moment.

He ran a hand across the spines of his books, closing his eyes and sensing the company of murderers. He longed to join their ranks, to accept membership into an elite band of men (they were always men, at least the ones he admired) who had actually taken a human life – more than one; scores of victims. It was his dearest dream to be like them, his heroes, his fathers. His first experience was so close that he could almost feel it brushing against his skin. Someday soon he would act, and the line would finally be crossed.

His attention was drawn by a sound from Mother’s room. He stood and listened, waiting for it to come again. A slow, lazy thumping, like someone banging on a distant door. He knew that she was trying to move, shifting her wireframe body in an attempt to sit up in bed. Maybe she was thirsty, or simply craving his company.

Daryl left his room and went downstairs, ignoring her feeble movements. Let the bitch suffer, just as he had suffered for so many years, unable to cut the leash and get a girlfriend, not allowed beyond the doors of the big old house he’d been born in.

His heroes had all tasted the fruits that he desired – sex, death, adventure. Daryl was yet to glimpse such fascinations: his scope was limited, the level of his life experience pitiful.

In the living room he turned on the television. A news broadcast flashed onto the screen, something about a series of unprovoked attacks in Leeds city centre. The newsreader was pretty, blonde, and aching to be slashed. He imagined cutting her, peeling off her insincere skin to reveal the truth of the musculature beneath.

“… police are advising Leeds residents to stay indoors and lock themselves in. Episodes of civil unrest are increasing throughout the night, and an official spokesman has said that these events seem entirely random and unorganised. When asked about the possibility of terrorist activity, he stated again that the events are not linked. In other news…”

Daryl muted the set and went to the stereo, glancing out of the window as he did so. The curtains were open; he could see the stretched sheet of the sky, a shooting star crossing it like an animated image. Wow, he thought, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen a comet.

He watched the fiery nova until it flared briefly and then faded, feeling an obscure sense of loneliness deep within his core. Was this an echo of what everyone else experienced when they fell in love, had babies, made a home together? Had he just been offered a glimpse into the world they inhabited, like a shooting star himself, coming close enough to see but not quite touch?

He forced his attention back to the stereo, disturbed by such maudlin thoughts.

Mother hated any music other than old time jazz, the kind played by big bands with busty female singers, and her beloved hymns. Daryl had smashed all her jazz records in front of her the day after she’d come home from hospital, and urinated on the remains. They were collectors items – most of them – and it had felt good to rob the world of their worth.

Selecting a Madonna CD from the stack, he slid it into the player and cranked the volume up way beyond what Mother thought of as acceptable.

Madonna: there was another slut who wanted killing. He failed to understand why no one had ever tried.

Daryl danced around the large room, his movements almost comically uncoordinated. He would never dance in public; the shame would be too heavy to bear. Anyway, Mother had not once agreed to him going anywhere that he could dance, even at the age when all his schoolyard acquaintances (never friends; Daryl had no idea how to form and maintain conventional relationships) had gone to the pubs and clubs in town. But here, alone, he was happy to kick off his shoes and boogie on down to the murder bop.

He knew this was no way for a twenty-three year-old man to act, but he was celebrating his newfound sense of freedom. Before Mother had fallen ill, when she had ruled over his world with a sharp tongue and a hard fist, he would never have dreamed of doing anything to upset her. Now that she was unable to fight back, he was prepared to do whatever the hell he wanted. No: whatever the fuck he wanted.

Yes, that felt good. Profanity, even in the privacy of his mind, was forbidden. He never understood exactly how Mother knew when he was thinking bad words, but she always picked up on it.

“Fuck you, Mother.” He giggled and spun, spun and giggled. Madonna sang about a holiday, and Daryl realised with no little irony that he was currently embarking on a permanent vacation from all that had gone before. A further irony was that he didn’t even like Madonna’s music.

When the song ended he sat down on the couch, sweating and panting for breath. He picked up the remote control and flicked off the stereo, preferring silence for a little while. Too much freedom was making him giddy. He needed to regain some composure.

He reached under the floral print cushion and brought out a small, worn hardback book, a volume of poetry he’d never read. Mother had given it to him as a gift when he was a boy, expecting him to respond to culture. Unfortunately, his idea of culture was something that grew in a Petri dish, and would ooze foul-smelling liquor if you stabbed it with the nib of a pen.

He opened the book to the middle pages and took out the single photograph which lay inside. He handled it carefully, like a religious artefact, touching it only with the tips of his fingers. He would never forgive himself if he smudged the image, defaced the immaculate face in the photograph.

There she was. His proposed first victim. The woman he’d been thinking about killing for six months. He’d first seen her at a petrol station forecourt on Kirkstall Road, filling up the tank of her green Mini Cooper. Something about her had attracted him, but not in a sexual way. Like most of the men he sought to emulate, Daryl did not have a conventional sexual drive. His needs were much more esoteric than those of the average citizen.

He remembered following her home that first day, trailing her to the nice city centre flat where she lived with her husband. They had not been married long, and still seemed flushed by the excitement of simply being together. Daryl could not understand such things. Emotions like love and compassion were off his radar.

He’d kept a close eye on her after that; then, coming to a decision, he’d upped the surveillance and begun to stalk her. For the past three months he had charted her every move, keeping a dossier on her. He knew her husband’s shifts, her routines, her patterns. Monday, Tuesday and Friday mornings she went to the gym. Every week-day afternoon she worked part-time at an Accountants office, walking the short distance from the flat. Weekends were changeable, but still followed a basic routine: a brisk morning walk down by the canal, breakfast muffins bought at Greggs bakery, then back to bed for a mid-morning nap – or, if her husband was not at work, a long work-out session between the sheets. Such creatures of habit, these people; they were so much more like him than they might like to think.

He’d taken the photograph early one morning when she was heading off for her usual visit to the gym. It was a full body shot, catching her just as she stepped out of the door, turning on her heel to close it behind her. Her almost shoulder-length blonde hair caught gems from the morning sun and her face glowed with what he could only describe as a supernatural radiance. There was magic in the picture. The sort of commonplace mysticism other people – normal people – might notice at sunset, or perhaps as twilight fell upon the land like a fine mist. Daryl loved the photo, and he loved the image it contained. As far as he was concerned, that also meant he loved the woman it represented. But it was not a natural kind of affection; no, it was something only he could understand, and to speak it out loud would end only in disaster.

Love, for Daryl, was a twisted thing, a malicious shadow tugging at his heels. Not for him the hearts and flowers of the rest of the world. He preferred knives and spleens, or skulls and hammers. Smiling, he brought the photograph up to his lips, kissed the air in front of it, and felt what passed for emotion in his dark world flood his senses like a short burst of bitter juice.

Daryl wanted to kill this woman so much that it manifested as an ache inside his gut, a low pulse that he could not deny. Lately the pulse had grown stronger, more difficult to ignore. The time was rapidly approaching when he must either shit or get off the pot. It was a crude metaphor – one he’d heard in a film – but a very apt one.

It was getting late. He knew he should be thinking about sleep, but these days he felt energised at night, as if he drew inspiration from the darkness. He thought he might torture Mother for a while before retiring to bed. Perhaps the flame of a lit match applied to the soles of her feet, or small slices from a razor blade directly under her armpits. There were so many methods to cause another human being pain. He’d researched them all, in books and on the Internet. The information was out there, in a variety of forms, if you looked hard enough, and wanted to find it badly enough.

He climbed the stairs and went to the bathroom, where he brushed his teeth and washed his face in the sink. The bowl of the sink was greasy with dirt; since Mother’s illness took hold, he’d not bothered to clean the house. He considered using the toilet, but did not need to. He stared at his face in the mirror, reaching back behind him and to the left to turn out the light. His round, bespectacled face darkened, becoming something more sinister: a mask, with blackness peering out from the eye, nose and mouth holes. It was a wonderful illusion, and he marvelled at the fact that such hard truths nearly always presented themselves when one was least expecting them.

The truth, Daryl knew, rarely ventured out of its hiding place. But when it did… oh, when it did, huge changes were bound to follow.