Two of the women bunked in the same room. He had to be quick about killing them. He hated being quick. A cockroach deserved a quick death. Not a woman. For she was a play thing in her final minutes.
He stuck a pillow over the first woman’s face, both hands over her nose and mouth until she stopped squirming. Her muffled cries for help barely reached his ears. Then, using the same pillow, he smothered the other woman’s face, but only to stop her screams from drifting out of the room. He took his knife and used it to cut her shirt from the bottom up. She railed against him. The blade sliced into the flesh of her abdomen.
“Damn you,” he whispered as he cut her neck. Stupid whore. Covered him in blood. He couldn’t surprise Alice like he had planned. He pulled the pillow off the dead woman’s face. Her opened eyes glistened. “All you had to do was play along for a few minutes.”
The floorboards creaked in the hallway outside the room. He stopped and leaned back against the wall. At the end of the corridor there were two doors. But he found himself unable to recall which one led to which woman. The whore’s rebellion had thrown him off. Enter the wrong room, and everything was ruined. He’d have to kill Alice right away instead of playing with her first.
What a shame.
Alice tantalized him in all the right ways.
He continued down the hallway, walking close to the trim. It helped to reduce squeaking. He stopped at the end of the corridor between two doors. One to the right. One to the left. The house exhaled a steady hum, while wind and rain battered its shell. He closed his eyes, absorbed the sounds, and held his knife out.
“Oh, show me the way, my steeled companion,” he whispered.
When he looked down, the knife pointed to the left.
Of course, the door with the seashell sign hanging from a bent nail. Alice’s room. She had said she grew up on the beach in Florida before attending the Savannah College of Art and Design.
SCAD, he thought. What a silly name.
He opened the door on the right. It smelled floral. Overly so. And it was hot. A sheet covered the woman. As he neared, he noticed how tightly wrapped it was around her ass. She mumbled something indecipherable as she drew one knee up. He stepped into the room, spun in a half circle, and shut the door, holding the knob tight to the right to prevent the latch from clicking while he turned the lock.
At the side of the bed, he clawed for her face, but found her hair. He traced his fingertips along her body toward the foot of the bed. Felt the dip in her lower back. The shapeliness of her ass. His preference for her to be on her back diminished. The stomach would be even better. He wedged his fingers into the crease where her thighs met.
She tensed. Her leg snapped back and her thighs pressed tight together.
He snatched her pillow, wrapped it around her face. As he straddled her back, he tied the ends of the pillowcase together. She thrashed underneath him, but all it did was arouse him. He worked his hands along her arms until each gripped a wrist. He wrenched them back until they touched. The pillow muffled her choking sobs. He held her arms in place with one hand, and grabbed the bedsheet with the other, which he used to tie her wrists together. She continued to thrash, her back pressing against his testicles. He went still, closed his eyes, cocked his head and listened.
Her moans melted into the howling wind and pelting raindrops. There was no way they slipped past the door. The door which he’d shut. The door which he’d locked.
He had time to get some of the vitriol out of his system.
Alice would appreciate that.
Using his knee, he wedged her thighs apart. She twisted and bucked, but couldn’t force him away. He tore her panties down the middle. But then the sensations that stirred in the graveyard, and yet again while she fought underneath him, were no longer present.
As much as he wanted the release so that he would be in control when he went to Alice, that would not be the case.
“Shit. You stupid, stupid bitch. What’s wrong with you?”
He hopped off the bed. The woman rolled over and retreated to the corner. The pillow slipped down, revealing her darkened eyes, nose and mouth. She could have screamed, but she didn’t. Instead, she whined breathlessly.
“Please, don’t.”
Using the sheet he snatched off the floor, he wiped her friend’s blood off his blade. Then he lunged forward and gagged her with the bloodied sheet. With her arms bound behind her, she could do nothing other than kick to defend herself. Not an easy feat with his weight bearing down on her thighs.
He rose up, one hand behind her head, pulling tight on her neck. The other holding the knife in front of his crotch, inches from her throat.
One way or another, he’d have his release.
And so he stabbed her over thirty times. The blade penetrated her face, neck, chest, abdomen and thighs.
He left her to bleed out, the knife buried deep in her stomach. The doorknob on the other side of the hallway felt cold against his flushed skin. He gripped it. Turned it. Cracked the door. Felt a rush of cold air that smelled like lavender wash over him.
“Hello, Alice,” he said in his country accent. “I thought we might talk for a while.”
She rolled over. Her form cut through the darkness as she sat up. She switched on a flashlight aimed at herself. He could see from her exposed breasts and erect nipples that she was happy he’d entered her room.
“I was hoping you’d join me,” she said.
“I know you were, Alice.” His voice had changed. He was no longer the unassuming man caught in the storm. He was the man they wished they’d never run into. He was Novak. “But this night is not going to go as you expected.”