7

In the prevailing summer months, I was overcome with a fervent expectation and an almost quivering sense of excitement. I struggled to sleep, tossing and turning a number of empty hours away. When I did sleep, I dreamed about killing Darren in a multitude of ways. Sometimes I ripped open his throat; once with a sharp knife, another time with the clawed edge of a hammer. Sometimes I strangled or beat him. On all occasions I took great joy in his painful demise.

My chance to kill him came a few weeks after the incident in the park. His parents had gone on holiday, taking the younger child with them. Darren had either refused to go or hadn’t been invited. He stayed at home, partying with his slow-witted friends and annoying the neighbors with loud music, drinking, drug taking, and general hoodlum activity. It would have been easy for me to slip into a few of those parties, so inebriated and diverse were the attendees, but I kept my distance and studied them patiently from behind the boundary in the back garden.

On four successive nights in his room, his friends stayed over and drank themselves into oblivion while Darren fucked any desperate and drunken teenage girls he could—the pretty redhead excluded. I made brief appearances just to check in on him and his erratic behavior, having no intention to stay out all night watching him and his cronies fuck and vomit their way into an abyss.

On the fifth night, he had plans elsewhere. It was a Saturday and he was going to the pub, an apparent lock-in—a much hyped episode broadcast to him by a semi-retarded blonde kid with aggressive acne. There was a promise of cheap drinks and a night of unadulterated drunkenness, after which everyone—except Darren, for reasons I didn’t grasp—would be going back to the pizza-faced boy’s house to spend the night. It was the perfect chance for me to strike. Darren would return drunk and alone. I would have all night to get my first kill.

I left my house at around eleven, at which time I was confident Darren would be at the pub, heavily intoxicated. It would give me enough time to sneak into his house and set up a plan of attack. My uncle was semiconscious. He had fallen asleep watching an old western, his beer-riddled half-corpse twitching to the sounds of simulated gunshots as I crept soundlessly into the night.

On the fourth night, Darren and his friends had spent some time in the back garden, sitting on the patio and staring at the stars while the remaining dregs of sunlight were drained from the glass of the day. This was why I hadn’t spent much time behind the garden wall on that night, and it was also the reason I was able to sneak into the house the following night. There were no kids in the back garden on that night, but Darren was feckless and reckless enough to have still left the door unlocked, giving me the opportunity I needed.

The curtains were open and moonlight streamed in through the windows, offering me a partial path as I accustomed myself with the layout of the first floor. I skulked around, drinking in the details of the floor plan in case I needed to chase him around. I took a large kitchen knife from the drawer, the biggest and sharpest of a carving set that had seen better days. It made more sense than bringing my own weapon. I didn’t want to carry a murder weapon home. I certainly didn’t want to leave it at the scene of the crime.

I had bought a pair of gloves for the occasion. They were black, tight to my flesh, and allowed for easy manipulation of my fingers. The blade felt weighty and strong in my hands, as if brushing against my flesh and not a thin coating of synthetic material.

I found three bedrooms upstairs, two of which I dismissed quickly. One was clearly the master bedroom: a long-mirrored wardrobe rested along the front, a queen-sized bed pushed up against the opposing wall. The other was filled with an array of children’s toys, while a single bed, adorned with a Ninja Turtle duvet set, stood against the far wall.

The final room was clearly Darren’s. The musty smell, the rank, fetid air, and the detritus scattered around the floor like flecks on a Pollock painting all gave it away.

In his room, a sense of power and excitement overcame me. Stalking through the place where he rested his empty head and wanked his parental complexes away, with an instrument of murder clenched tightly in my fist, I felt a godlike power I had never experienced before. In a matter of hours, minutes, or moments, I would be taking a human life. I would have power over life and death. I would be the one to choose how much he suffered and for how long. It was exhilarating and overpowering, so much so that I remained standing there for many moments.

The sound of a key slipping into a lock finally snapped me out of my trance. In that time, the darkness had become my friend—my eyes adjusting to a light only they could see. Darren would turn the light on when entering, but not if I could get to him first. With a broad smile, I snuck in behind the bedroom door, the knife poised and prepared at shoulder height, waiting for the drunken idiot to stumble for the light switch before I pounced.

The smile dripped from my face like warm ice cream when I heard the sound of a female voice punctuating the silence. Darren wasn’t alone.

I quickly scanned the room for a place to hide; a chest of drawers to duck behind, a wardrobe to dive inside. There was a small bedside cabinet, a set of drawers barely big enough to conceal a small animal, and a small wardrobe that sat on an unstable foundation. There wasn’t even a bed to slide underneath, just a mattress slapped onto the floor like junkyard treasure in a homeless shelter.

I edged open the door, looked into the hallway. I could see the lights spilling from downstairs as Darren conversed loudly with his female guest, evidently breaking into his parents’ liquor supply in an effort to appease or sedate her.

I slipped out, creeped across the hallway, and peeked over the banister, down the stairs. They were in the living room; on the opposing wall their illuminated shadows danced a tentative dance. They hadn’t sat, hadn’t rested. The front door was a tempting target at the foot of the stairs, but they were closer to it than I was.

I didn’t want to kill them both. A double murder was too risky, too messy. Not now. Not at this point in my career. I wasn’t that desperate.

I needed to be patient, to hold my nerve. I put my foot on the top step, prepared to move toward the door. The step creaked and groaned with a sound greater than I remembered on my ascent. It sounded deafening. I closed my eyes until that noise, and that of my own quickening heartbeat, faded. Then I took another step, my hand firmly gripping the banister to alleviate the pressure I was applying to the creaky floorboards.

“Come on,” I heard Darren saying. The annoying laugh that had taunted me for many years was now present in its drunken form. “Down it. Down it. Down it,” he began to chant, almost grunting.

The female gagged a choking sound in reply, her voice strained through the efforts of forced alcohol consumption. She groaned, coughed. I moved onto the third step.

I heard the sound of a vigorous kiss, a sloppy, noisy caress. Then I heard glass on wood as a bottle was put down. I held my breath, praying they would do what they intended to do on the couch and leave me to an unheeded escape.

The kiss finished with a passionate breath. “Not here,” the girl said. “Upstairs.”

I gulped and instinctively moved my right heel backward, to the second step.

“What’s wrong with here?”

That’s right, you tell her. Couch, bed, floor, it doesn’t make a difference; she can be equally disappointed on all three.

She sounded a negative groan. “Not here,” she asserted. “Bed!”

I moved my left foot back to the second step.

“Fine!” Darren spat, annoyed. I heard movement, quick, eager footsteps.

I quickly turned, jumped the final stair, ran across the hallway, and ducked into the master bedroom on my left. The sound of my own heaving heart canceled out the noise of the creaky floorboards, but I was sure they would have heard me.

I listened, waiting for the inevitable questions, the paranoia and the panic. It didn’t come.

In his parents’ bedroom, with the sound of keen footsteps beginning their ascent, I headed straight for the walk-in wardrobe opposite the door and adjacent to the bed. It was large enough to accommodate me until I could make my escape.

I waited for them to go to Darren’s room so I could slip out of the house during their thirty seconds of breathless passion, but instead they stumbled into the master bedroom.

Darren tugged the unfortunate female behind him with an eager and desperate lust. As he opened the door, the room bathed in light from the hallway and I twitched under its glow, fading further into the wardrobe and watching the action unfurl through a thin opening in the door.

I watched Darren pull his prey aggressively into the room, practically throwing her onto the bed before beaming down at her with a lustfulness that threatened to pop his eyes from his skull.

His eyes were wide, glassy and desperate. The crotch of his faded blue jeans bulged.

“You ready, baby?”

He whipped off his shirt. I threw up a little in my mouth.

I turned my attention to the girl. She was propping up her chubby physique with her elbows, watching the undressing simpleton with wanton eyes. She wore a short black skirt, tight around her ample backside and short enough to expose her thick thighs, the skin of which was bruised and red in places and heavily tanned everywhere else. She instinctively opened her legs, gesturing with her short dumpy body for Darren to enter her.

While Darren undressed, struggling to remove his pants, she stroked a finger between her legs, toying with a moistened pair of white knickers.

I found myself scowling at her face, at her dimpled, ruby cheeks, her glossy eyes and her protruding tongue. I didn’t know who she was; she didn’t go to my school and I had never made her acquaintance, but I had seen her before. She had been at Elizabeth’s party. She was the little fat fuck who had been enthralled with the thought of tricking and humiliating me, even though she didn’t know who I was. She was the one who had been swapping saliva with my classmate while trying to stop his hands from probing the depths of her infectious cunt.

Fucking trampy little waste of space.

Darren undressed and set to work on her, quickly tearing off her knickers and tossing them away. They flew toward the wardrobe, toward me. The moistened skid-marked material slapped at the wardrobe door and rebounded onto the floor with the faintest whisper.

In my head I urged him on, encouraging him to go where everyone had gone before and to contaminate her with whatever bulbous, warty disease he had festering and fermenting on his sweaty, unwashed, overused penis.

“Wait, wait!” she protested, trying to spit out his sloppy attempts at foreplay, blocking his pulsating cock with the palm of her hand. “Condom. We need a condom!”

Shame. I would have loved to see the mongrel offspring those two delinquents produced. The bastard, mutant child of two people who shouldn’t be allowed to live, let alone reproduce.

“You’re on the pill!” Darren objected.

“I have to be sure.”

“But—but—” Darren was looking desperate. He swayed forward, hoping to slip in unseen. Perhaps thinking that he could get inside, do his thing, and then finish before she knew what was going on. She slapped him away again. “Come on,” he urged. “I’m clean, I swear.”

Quite frankly, I’m amazed they didn’t hear my stifled laugh.

“I don’t want to get pregnant!” the girl yelled. “Ya know what happened to my sister, she was on the pill and she got pregnant. Get a fucking condom!”

“Fuck,” Darren spat desperately, looking like he was ready to explode. His eyes darted quickly around the room. “What if I pull out before I cum?”

I grinned at his desperation.

“Get a fucking condom!” she barked. “You’re not putting that thing inside me without one. I don’t want to get pregnant.”

She didn’t care about the wiggling, festering things that would climb into her vagina and prepare—with the benefit of reinforcements from the town’s many diseased and desperate dicks—to fight an eternal battle against loosely prescribed antibiotics, but she did object to the idea of procreation. Thank God for small miracles and smaller minds.

Darren groaned noisily and I grinned widely at his audible discomfort. I heard him shift away from his inebriated mate and scurry out of the room. The noise of his desperate search filtered through to his parents’ room like a lingering nighttime rodent scuttling through debris in an attic.

The girl called out to Darren, “I have some in my bag.” But her words were heavily lubricated and soft, unable to seep through to her scrambling mate. She didn’t seem to mind and clearly wasn’t in a rush.

I saw her loll back onto the bed, groaning as she did so. Her skirt had been pushed up to her bulbous stomach, her exposed vagina glistened as she set to work on pleasing herself. I scrunched up my face and gagged a little, making a soft but audible noise. She didn’t hear.

Considering what comes and goes through a woman’s vagina, what plethora of typically disgusting fluids are ejected from its fleshy folds, it amazes me how men can find a moist one so alluring. When they’re not cleaning out the ejections of other men’s failed attempts at procreation, or wiping away the dribbles of their own spent urine, they’re picking the crusts of dried menstrual blood from those apparently appealing folds. Clearly men will stick their penises anywhere.

Darren, who had yet to encounter a hole he didn’t want to poke, seemed a little insulted when, after stumbling into the bedroom with a pack of condoms held proudly in his hand, he discovered the moaning mountain of flesh had started without him. He wasted no time in slipping on the latex and then jumping on top of her, where he quickly finished what had taken him many breathless moments to start.

He was practically wheezing when he finished. He rolled off of her and turned immediately away, his naked form curling into the fetal position. The girl looked perplexed. She hadn’t seen him reenter the room and seemed surprised that not only had the sex started, but it had also finished.

“Is that it?” she asked.

He groaned in reply and held up his arm, exposing a filled condom that drooped toward the bed like a depressed, deflated balloon. He flung it across the room carelessly and the girl watched with absent eyes as it splattered against the far wall, hung there momentarily, and then began a slow decline, dripping down the magnolia like an anemic slug.

She groaned in annoyance, peeking over occasionally at his disinterested form before staring at the ceiling, her fingers tapping her stomach. She turned to his back, moistened with his succinct lascivious labors. “Will you be ready to—” She stopped speaking when she received a preemptive snore in reply. Darren was already asleep.

“Bastard,” she muttered under her breath. She turned over, facing away from him. She tried to continue her solo efforts at stimulation, but she seemed unable to get in the right mood. A feeling of being duped got in the way of her desire and eventually she closed her eyes and forced herself to sleep.

I watched her attempts at slumber. She was distracted, uncomfortable, and annoyed; she wouldn’t be sleeping too soon. I sighed inwardly and skulked to the back of the cupboard, resting my head against a soft and heavy piece of clothing and preparing myself for a long night.

——

I scrambled out of the wardrobe sometime later. Darren was still facing away, his naked and sweaty body rising and falling with the fluctuations of his rattling breath. The girl lay beside him, her body curved in a similar posture, the duvet half thrown over her body. Her suffering breath sang noisily as it strained through her dehydrated lungs.

I watched them momentarily as they breathed their rotten breaths into an air that already stank of their sweaty and brief exertions. Their naked forms looked so vulnerable and exposed. It would have been so easy to kill them both there and then, to slit her throat and end her miserable existence without Darren even stirring, giving me enough time to reset myself before suffocating the pointless life from his diseased body. But I was tired, stiff, and ill-prepared for a double murder. I retired from the room and descended the stairs.

The light from the hallway remained active; the house was bathed in a prominent glow. Despite the light and the sound of my footfalls on the stairs, still creasing and groaning an audible distraction, I was comfortable. There was little chance that either one of the comatose pair would awaken, and an even smaller chance that they would be capable of chasing me if they did.

A handbag lay at the foot of the stairs, next to two pairs of shoes that had been kicked off in a hurry. The handbag was of a tatty denim material, shaded and pale in parts, rather like the chubby legs of its owner. Also like her legs, the bag had been abused by a number of teenagers—the illiterate hands of a dozen feckless youths had scrawled a number of inane references onto the worn material.

There was very little inside. A purse, empty but for a fake I.D., a voucher for a fast food restaurant, and around $2 in change; a tube of red lipstick, glistening with the herpetic fluid of a hundred kisses; a makeup box, the colors and foundations of which were smudged into each other like a child’s paint palette; a large pack of condoms, wholesale protection for a wholesale whore; and a small pill box.

The circular shaped pill box contained a number of contraceptive tablets. The pills themselves—small, white, innocuous—were embedded around the edges of the plastic device with the names of the days of the week above each one.

So desperate to avoid the sin of a mutant baby, borne to an incapable and promiscuous teenage mother and a septic, pointless father of any possible age and all possible retardations, she fought the threat with a double-edged contraceptive sword: condoms and birth-control pills. No doubt it decreased her chances of sexual success to a reckless race of boys who preferred their tiny organs to be unsheathed, but evidently she still found willing members of the masculine race, whether through sheer desperation or complete drunkenness.

There were two weeks’ worth of pills left, yet I had no doubt that the condoms, a hefty pack of well over a dozen, would be used up before that in an orgy of debauchery, disappointment, and drunkenness. In two weeks, those condoms would stop a flood of potentially virile semen, with the pills acting as a safety net to catch any that managed to slip through the latex barrier. It would be a shame if anyone were to bring down those barriers and blunt that double-edged sword.

I took the pills to the kitchen and popped them out into the sink, using a flush of water from the faucet to send them down the plughole. The tiny tablets popped easily through the tiny grates in the drain. I found a small pack of pocket mints in one of the many drawers, spearmint flavored, white, roughly the same size as the pills. I put the mints inside the box, refilling it to within a pill of how I had left it. She might taste the mint as she washed them down, but I knew I wasn’t dealing with the sharpest tool in the shed, so she wouldn’t give it a second thought.

The box went back in the drawer after that, but before I closed it, a picture in the drawer caught my attention. I stopped in my tracks, entranced. The picture was of Darren’s mother, sitting alone, sleepy, smiling warmly at the camera from underneath a cozy winter blanket. Her son, Darren’s younger brother, was curled up at her feet like a dog.

I removed the photo, straightened it out on the counter. There was also a photo of her on the kitchen windowsill; she was grinning into the camera rather drunkenly. She wore a bikini and looked to be standing on some sunny beach. One of those lands of sun, sea, and sex, some distant cloudless paradise where no matter where you go, everyone you encounter is loud, horny, and British. That photo hadn’t intrigued me, I didn’t even give it a second glance, but this one was different.

I carefully folded the photo and stuffed it into my pocket. It wouldn’t be missed, in a house full of junk, where the fridge was magnetized with a dozen trite slogans, postcards, pictures, and childish sketches, and where the floors were a battlefield of toys and the cabinets were mere storage rooms for the crap that couldn’t be thrown away lest they serve a point in the future. One photograph wouldn’t be missed.

In another drawer, one that rattled disconcertingly with the sound of a multitude of cutlery and gadgets, I found a small pin with a pea-sized green head. I used this to puncture individual holes in each of the condoms, passing the needle through the wrapper and out the other side. It left an unnoticeable—especially in times of need—hole that would further serve the purpose of impregnating the sleeping beast upstairs. Despite failing to kill Darren, I left with a smile on my face. His death could wait. His parents would be back soon and my window of opportunity would close for an indeterminable window, but I was happy to bide my time. They say good things come to those who wait and I was happy to do just that.