5

Happy holidays!” she called with a joyful wave. “Have a good Christmas!”

I hate that. There is nothing wrong with a simple goodbye, or even a smile to punctuate the end of the conversation and the point where the parties involved can respectfully move on. She doesn’t want me to have a happy Christmas—a happy Christmas for me is one spent ripping her throat open and watching her peppy joy gush onto her cream carpets.

I grinned back, hiding a sneer. I instinctively looked to the case I carried. It looked nondescript, harmless. I could easily pass as a businessman, a smiling, caffeine-fueled solicitor off to ruin someone else’s life and set another criminal free, or a teacher set to poison the minds of more hopeless future criminals. But it stocked a lot more than papers, books, and the pursuit of the capitalistic dream.

She beamed at me as I dragged my attention back to her Prozac smile. “See you soon!” she said.

Fuck you, bitch.

She didn’t even know who I was and had interpreted my vacant smile as a friendly invitation to a brief conversation. I knew who she was, although it had been fifteen years since I had last seen her and a lot had happened since then. She was the vicar’s wife, born in Stepford with a stick up her ass and a silver spoon between her smugly pursed lips. She was everything I resented about the holidays and religion. I watched her with a look of utter contempt as she greeted the next person to pass her on the street, a look of reciprocated joy on both of their faces, a glimmer of something else on his. He was probably sticking it to her when her husband was at church sticking it to all the little choir boys. I knew the little cunt when I was growing up. I had sought solace in his church when Darren and his cretinous cronies were chasing me. I tried to hide in the confessional as the bullies waited outside. Instead of providing refuge and doing the Christian thing, he had thrown me to the lions. I still held a grudge, but that wasn’t why I was here.

I turned from his wife and her fling in disgust, catching a snippet about some odious fucking newsletter. These people disgusted me—more skeletons in their closets than most and not an ounce of irony about their twisted little secret lives. It was for people like this that I wanted there to be an afterlife; a God and a devil. Just to know that when they arrived at the pearly gates, he was wiping away their smug expressions and sending them down to hell, where I’d be waiting for them, preparing to spend eternity perpetually murdering them.

I made my way to the top of the street, into the backroads and onto the path that led to the church. The Old Lady was a three-hundred-year-old piece of architectural brilliance that had once been a beacon of light and hope in my hometown, but had since degraded into a place of bullshit and blasphemy. Easter egg hunts; weddings between airheads who should be barred from marriage, never mind encouraged to procreate; and christenings for lower-class fuckwits who should have gone the way of a worthless Spartan child, thrown into a pit and left to die.

The Old Lady was still a home for the local religious types, who were thankfully few and far between. If I had been christened then I would have been christened there, but my father was no man of God and he was no hypocrite.

My grandmother lived on the outskirts of town. River Acres was untouched by the hellhole that was Whitegate and unspoiled by the detritus that lived there. I spent the night in a local B&B not too far from where she lived, but ventured into the town in the morning for the first time since the night I lost my virginity. I had no fond memories of what I had left behind, but as I sat on the bus and watched the wilderness rush by my window, I remembered the journey I had taken fifteen years ago, following the demise of my unfortunate uncle, the somewhat-accidental deaths of Darren’s father and brother, and the joyous deaths of those four imbeciles. I had taken everything that I could carry, everything that was important to me or my father, and I had destroyed the rest. At the epicenter of the fire that destroyed my home were all of the things that I didn’t want anyone to see, the things that could implicate my father as The Butcher.

I had always intended to get away unseen after my first murders, to be a shadow as my father had been, but that night I had been too impulsive. I had made far too many mistakes. I got lucky, and after that, I vowed never to act on impulse again.

In the years that followed, I did my best to change my appearance. This was aided by my growth into adulthood, and despite my young face having been all over the news at the time, no one ever made the connection. I became a creature of the night after that, and I took to wearing hoods, hats, and anything else that could shadow my face when I was out and about. I honed my skills, realized my mistakes, and learned from them. I had done well to practice restraint in the past but had failed in the moment, acting on impulse, so I learned to restrain myself and to think about my actions even during the kill.

That fear of being recognized and that obsession with disguise also led to my new persona, although the mask was there for witnesses and for CCTV, as I knew my victims would never live to tell anyone who I was. The mask was a mottled gray, a diseased skull. I found it in the house of one of my first victims, someone who had provided refuge, someone I had killed for money after they had tried to exploit me for something else. It wasn’t spotted with blood or guts, it wasn’t your typical Halloween mask, but it was chilling. It was a prop for a play, a rendition of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” It had been a story I knew little about when I was younger, but one I became fascinated with after discovering the mask. That was purely coincidental—although the connection had been made by a few journalists—but in time, when the plague came, laid a path of devastation, and then departed, it would be clear to everyone.

The Old Lady church was tucked away in a grim and uninspiring swath of woodland that enclosed an overgrown graveyard. No one had been buried there for two hundred years; the names that hadn’t been covered by moss and dirt, or lost to the elements, were forgotten, dying along with the people buried there.

Death had always struck me as a bizarre ritual. Nobody wanted to die and nobody wanted their loved ones to die, so life was all about clinging on in desperation and then staying around for as long as possible, in one form or another. There were only so many graveyards in the world, only so much space. The world wasn’t growing, but people didn’t stop dying.

I left the bright, fresh afternoon and entered the cold, spacious confines of the church. A place big enough to hold a congregation of hundreds, when a small shed with a few benches would probably suffice for the number of locals that actually gave a shit about religion.

I didn’t like the feel of church. I never had. If my life were a horror film, no doubt I would be naturally deterred by churches and would burst into flames or erupt with buboes of biblical proportions just by crossing the threshold. But in reality they just felt cold, empty, and dead.

I took a seat in the center of a middle pew and drank in the dead surroundings and the religious symbolism. At the foot of the church, down the aisle where many men and women had begun a journey on the long road to divorce, there stood a large statue of Jesus, looking like a holy Vitruvian Man.

The image of Christianity. A man who capitulated under the efforts of a malicious army and a malignant friend. The symbol of the ultimate sacrifice, enough to win the respect of future generations, yet if he’d have killed his captors by shooting spears out of his ass he would have won more respect and followers. Even I would follow a man capable of such heroics, although I’d still have a hard time believing it just by reading a two-thousand-year-old book.

I have no problem with religion, nor do I have an issue with the people who practice it. It keeps them out of my way, out of society’s way. They usually hole themselves up in big empty buildings, singing, preaching, and following rules laid out for them hundreds of years ago by people they’ve never seen but who definitely existed.

I do have a problem with the people who sit on the fence. If you believe in God and an afterlife, then good for you, just keep it to yourself until the question arises. But if you don’t go to church, don’t follow any dogma, and don’t count yourself as religious, don’t continue to sit on that fence when faced with the question of your belief. These people don’t want to refute His existence on the off chance that He does exist and will smite them for not believing. Where’s the sense in that? As if He suspects you don’t believe but is waiting for you to vocalize your doubts before He strikes you down. “It would be stupid to think an omnipotent being exists who controlled the world and made everything, but fuck me if I’m gonna say he doesn’t in case he unmakes me.” These people need to get a fucking opinion and learn how to use it. They piss me off. If ambiguity isn’t the death of them, then I fucking will be.

A middle-aged woman with a solemn expression entered the church with two meandering teenagers in her wake—probably her sons—their faces grim enough to indicate a recent bereavement. They looked old enough to be thinking on their own and living on their own, yet they seemed to follow her every step and her every word, still under her thumb, still following her rules and her commands. Their father had probably been mown down in the middle of his life, no doubt his own doing—a heart attack brought on by years of stress, the annoyance of raising two ugly kids with an ugly wife he couldn’t stand, and a diet of cigarettes, beer, and animal fat. Death had probably been an escape for him, a way of getting away from a controlling, obsessive, and neurotic woman who was always one misplaced text message away from making a broth from his pet rabbit or chopping off his penis while he slept.

The trio slumped down the aisle. One of the boys looked up at me as they passed, an attempted smile on his ugly little face. I smiled back, feigned a look of understanding and pity. He trudged on.

They settled at the front of the church, kneeling before the statue of Jesus. Their savior, their God; the man who gave his life as a symbolic gesture to the human race but couldn’t stop their loved one from eating one bacon sandwich too many.

They say people are sheep; not true. Sheep are smart. Sheep follow a black and white dog that clearly exists. Humans follow an invisible man in the sky that does not. I think when I was a kid, I may have entertained the idea of God—until a certain age I’m confident I did believe in him, falling for the dogma taught to me through a Church of England education and the half-assed religious ideals preached by early era children’s television presenters. I also believed in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, but I grew out of those beliefs around the same time I realized religion was also a crock of shit. Maybe the rest of the world has yet to grow up.

The vicar appeared from one of the back rooms with a smile of spiritual contentment on his face. He flashed a sympathetic look at the woman and her ugly kids. They all smiled back, their smiles forced, hers genuine. His eyes crossed to the empty congregation, and his eyebrows raised slightly when he saw me. He smiled and nodded, and I pretended I hadn’t seen him. He wouldn’t recognize me, there was no chance of that. Although, maybe if my face were covered in blood and I was being pummeled by half-witted hooligans he would.

I watched him meander around the front of the building. He placed a book down on an altar, calmly walked up to the single-parent family, said a few hushed words and hugged them in turn, his eyes on the mother’s flat backside as it waddled to the first row and plonked dully onto the wooden pew. The vicar watched as her children joined her and then he turned away.

He disappeared into the confessional, ducking behind the curtain. There was no one on the other side, the velvet fabric split to reveal an empty seat in the dusty box. I contemplated slipping in. I had plenty of sins to confess, and no doubt I would enjoy listening to his reaction while I did so, but life was too short.

I looked around the church. The mourning family sat slumped on the first row, their heads in their chests, their hands in the praying position. I could see tears streaming down the woman’s face, silent expressions on the faces of her sons. At the back of the room, an elderly man cradling a cane had entered the church to collect a leaflet and leave some coins in the collection plate. He was already on his way back out.

I had been seen by the family, the kid in particular, but it wouldn’t matter; he wouldn’t recognize me. He had other things on his mind. Keeping one eye on the mourning family and one on the feet of the vicar below the curtain, I clasped my hands around the handle of a screwdriver in my pocket, a six-inch steel shank comforted by a rubber easy-grip handle. Easy to carry, excusable if discovered, and much more precise and clinical for what I had in mind. It wasn’t the only weapon I carried. In the case was a set of chef’s knives, sharp and strong enough to sever steel. They were a little less convenient, a little harder to carry in my pocket, but they would come in handy later on.

I sidled on my backside to the edge of the row and rested the case on the floor, kicking it underneath one of the pews and making a mental note of its location for later. I took one last look around the church—the mother now muttering between her sobs, her children bearing the burden of her whispered regrets—and walked down the aisle, toward the confessional.

I ripped open the curtain with enough nonchalance to imply innocence should the situation not immediately suit me. The vicar hopped to his feet with a broad smile. No doubt he was preparing to tell me I had the wrong end, or that the toilets were further down, but it didn’t matter—the situation was perfect.

I pulled the screwdriver out of my pocket, clenched a tight fist around the cushioned handle, and then thrust it upward. He didn’t see the flash of steel as it skimmed the tip of his hyoid, realizing what was happening only when the delicate flesh of his throat sliced open like a ripe tomato.

The first thrust took it through the edge of his throat, where it drilled through the back of his tongue before boring up into his skull, cracking and wedging in the bone. A gurgle of desperation and surprise escaped his mouth. A trickle of blood ran down from the corner of his lips, tainting and staining his white dog-collar. A bubble of saliva, infused with a frothy drop of blood, grew out of his mouth like cherry bubblegum, popping when he tried to talk.

He was incapable of speech, but I doubted he had anything useful to say anyway. I drove the screwdriver further, to the hilt, the tip of my thumb touching the wound that the weapon had created, my nail plunging into the open flesh. A torrent of blood had already snaked down my hand, painting my clenched fist and my forearm.

He slumped against the back wall of the confessional with a hollow thud, his eyes rolled into the back of his head. He was finished. He was with his God now.

The screwdriver made a sucking sound as it popped out of his flesh. The wound sprayed fresh blood and I just managed to duck out of the way, watching as it coated the inside of the curtain.

I pulled him off the bench and shoved him underneath it. His body tucked nicely into the space there. His head was already beginning to drown in a pool of blood. I removed a cover from the bench—a thick nylon sheet—and stuffed it up against his lifeless face. The blood immediately soaked in. It was enough to hold it for now, but before long the blood would begin to seep out and leak toward the bottom of the curtain.

I heard the curtain next door being pulled closed, followed by the sound of a body sinking into creaking wood. There was someone else in the confessional.

“Bless me father, for I have sinned.”

I didn’t want anyone to discover the body. Soon the church would empty; I would have the time and the room to do what I had gone there to do.

I sat down, my calves pressed up against the dead vicar. There was a small wooden shutter between the two rooms. I peeled this back, keeping my head pressed up against the wall, out of sight. Behind the shutter was a corrugated mesh, thick enough to obscure my face from whoever happened to be looking.

The ugly kid who had smiled at me a few minutes ago was staring forward. I could see the side of his face, his huge nose, pointed chin—the profile of a kid who’d had all his respect for life bullied out of him at primary school.

I hoped I wouldn’t have to give the ugly little fucker any advice. He looked no older than sixteen, around the same age as me when my own father had died, but he clearly wasn’t heading down the same path and wasn’t anything like the person I became. I doubted I could tell him to do as I did. He barely looked capable of tying his shoelaces.

“It’s been three years since my last confession,” the voice beyond the mesh continued.

“That’s a long time.”

“Well, I, I have been busy.”

“Too busy for God?”

It’s not every day you get to judge someone through the eyes and actions of a respected authority figure.

“No, no. Of course not.”

“How old are you?” I asked.

“I—I’m sixteen, sir.”

“And you still live with your parents?”

“Just my mother, sir.”

I grinned. “Of course. Silly me.” I shifted in my seat and twisted my face as the stench of death tickled the hairs at the back of my nostrils. “Do you think it’s normal to live with your mother at that age? Do you think it’s normal that you still do everything for her, that she still has you running around like her little slave?”

He seemed confused. “What do—how do you know?”

“Doesn’t the bible say that He knows everything.”

“Well, yes, God knows everything, but—”

“Are you a faithful child, my son?”

“Yes, of course, of course I am.”

“Do you touch yourself at night?”

“What?” The ugly kid shot a look across at the mesh. I had snuck a peek, but I ducked back out of sight when I saw him flinch.

“Well, do you?” I persisted.

“No more than normal.”

“You consider that to be normal?”

“Well, I suppose. I mean, I guess other kids my age—”

“And if other kids your age jumped off a cliff would you follow?”

“No, God no.”

“Please don’t use the lord’s name in vain.”

“Sorry.”

“So, would you jump off a cliff with your friends?”

“Of course not.”

“But you’d happily indulge in mutual masturbation with them?”

“I don’t under—” He popped his head closer to the mesh. I pinned my head against the wall. The stench of coppery blood and evacuated bowels was beginning to work its way up from my seat. I didn’t have long before the kid figured something was wrong.

“What do you want to tell me, son?” I asked.

I felt his eyes flashing inquisitively through the mesh for a moment longer, then he settled back into his seat with a reflective sigh.

“It’s my father,” he said soberly. “I miss him.”

“That’s understandable.”

“I feel so lonely. I mean, things were never great for me, ya know? But with him around, it helped. He put a smile on my face at the end of the day. He fought away the bullies and the tears, and now what? I’m never going to see him again, am I?”

I ducked forward, opening the curtain and peering down the church. As I suspected, the youngster’s family had gone. He had snuck in unannounced, probably ashamed to let his mother know he was seeking help from someone other than her.

“The bible says that we will meet our loved ones in the afterlife, does it not?” I said, closing the curtain.

“I guess,” he replied.

“And you believe that you will see your father again, right?”

“I suppose so. In time.”

“You could always speed up the process.”

“What do you mean?” I sensed his huge nose pushing up against the mesh. The smell was beginning to become overwhelming and with his huge snout poking around, he had to be able to smell it, as well.

I forced the steel end of the screwdriver through the mesh. It crunched the wire and punctured through, straight into the inquisitive teenager’s eye. It popped like a fat grub, squirting opaque fluid onto the steel.

He recoiled with a croaking sound and tumbled backward. I sensed my heart quicken and my world momentarily slow. I had taken a risk; there was a chance he had been heard. A chance this would be seen.

I pulled the screwdriver out, darted out of the confessional, and turned toward the other side of the wooden death box. Bloodied hands were grasping at the curtain, pushing the material outwards like disembodied hands of velvet. I opened the curtain for him and stopped him from stumbling onto me by placing the sole of my foot onto his bloodied forehead and pressing him backward.

He was begging for his life. “Please, please, please.” Repetition always suits the doomed and the frightened.

With his good eye, he sensed the daylight behind me and tried to dash through. I pushed him down again, watching him tumble into the corner where he promptly curled into the fetal position and began to pray to his God.

I closed the curtain behind me and silenced his prayers. His God wasn’t going to help him. His God wasn’t capable of stopping anyone, let alone me. God works in mysterious ways, and very few of those ways are helpful. God does have one thing going for him though: He is a vengeful, vindictive, brutal tyrant, and that God would have appreciated the work that I did in his house.

The scene I left in the church was a thing of beauty and one I knew would be appreciated and understood by the right people.

There was a storm coming and I was going to be at its center.