The sky above was full of riotous, black and ragged clouds. Thunder rolled in across the mountains, denoting the start of what the brooding layer had promised since dawn and the wind picked up, howling, crying, warning, and baying like a wolf into the night. Soon the rain fell, slow to start, splattering the sidewalks haphazardly. The lightening flashed on a far away hillock, like a serpent of brilliant light sent to bite the earth.Then the sky shook with the loud cry of the heavy thunder again, and the rain lashed down in buckets, torrential, unforgiving. That masked man ran all the faster he could under the tumultuous, showery sky.
The downpour had drenched him to the skin. He reached the hotel following the lightening and moonlit stone path. Walking up the stairs, he advanced straight towards Room no 121, his pace unhurried and measured. As loud as it was outside the windows, the insides were eerie silent and still, almost sinister. No noise was to be heard except that of the torrent of rain.
The room was spacious, warm and aesthetic with blood red carpet and golden brown wallpaper depicting graceful decorative patterns of art. On the huge, kind sized bed laid a young woman of profound beauty and youth. It was more of the aliveness of her body, face, and soul than the physical beauty itself that seemed to spellbind the senses.
The masked man’s eyes twinkled with a strange glint as they set upon the sleeping woman. They delineated hunger, starvation and a queer craving. The keen longing evident in his dark eyes was odd. Bizarre. Almost inhuman. It didn’t seem like the typical sexual lust rather it was something different and completely unusual. He lips curved into a smile as he approached nearer to her.
Suddenly, pulling out a silver dagger from the pocket of his overcoat, he stabbed it swiftly into her stomach releasing a gush of red hot liquid. His hands shook with excitement as he raised the dagger, his expression that of a mad mans’. Eyes, billowing out.
He gazed intensely as the dagger sliced her intestines, speared through her flesh and pierced one of the most vital parts of her body. The twinkle in his eyes brightened, and his pulse raced with excitement rushing the blood rapidly through his veins. His muscles tensing. He was quivering all over with dangerous exhilaration. His favorite kind of euphoria.
He did not stop. He could not stop. He continued thrusting the dagger into her body again and again. That smirk broadened. During each murder he had committed, his eyes feasted on every second of victims death, seeing their tortured shakes and movements, his ears savored the helpless moans, and his dagger was adamant to cease the failing heartbeat every time. His insanity was evident, and he knew it, but that simple fact was nothing compared to his need; to his need for ruthless killing and torturing. Blood dripped from the bed onto the red carpet surrounding the killer’s shoes.
The masked killer never failed to finish his job, by ensuring that each person was dead before long before fleeing.
The assassinator wanted to stay. He wanted to stare more at that mangled, bloody and once delicate body but he couldn’t, for he had to leave and thrust the corpse in the darkness of the ink blue night to where it belonged… into the vast deep-sea neighboring the whole resort.
_______________________________________________
I’m an incredibly handsome man in my mid-thirties. Safety, stability, and simplicity are all that I want from life. I want an ordinary life. Don’t all sensible people do? Don’t all intelligent men want peace and the prominence of things? In short, I am well-behaved, mentally robust and healthy. People usually describe me as extremely attractive. I have tanned skin and azure eyes with my hair short and messy brown. My one glance can sweep any woman off her feet.
I had a wife. She is dead now. She was alluring with a sculpted figure which was twine-thin. Her waist was tapered, and she had a burnished complexion. A pair of arched eyebrows looked down on those sweeping eyelashes. Her eyes were a gateway to heaven. I could stare at them all day. That color. They glowed with the depth of universal love, casting off stardust as a diamond casts fire and they smoldered like embers of a fire in a desert night. We had found a deep, rare and warm contentment in each other’s lives but now, she was gone. My love was gone. My life was gone.
Her parents were against our marriage given they had no indication of my past life. But later, they disappeared somewhere. Just like that, they simply disappeared.
A part of me wanted tranquility while the other part of me sometimes craved the lust of thrills and adventures. I couldn’t resist the temptation of living a shivering, stirringly wildlife. No. Sorry. That wasn’t me. I didn’t want this. A friend of mine hankered after this, not me. Or maybe it was me? I sometimes wondered what if there were multiple souls in our body but ours’ is the most powerful one, so we have control over our body and perhaps the different voices that we hear in our head are just the weaker souls talking to us. And maybe people with schizophrenia don’t have an assertive soul so all of the souls are fighting to take over. I don’t know!
My wife, Katherine, and I went to a beach resort after about three months of matrimony on a holiday. That enclosed place usually slumbered under the skies.The bright ball blinded people as it emerged; it would raise like a yellow lollipop on the distant horizon crashing against the shore, small waves washed the nights’ debris onto the land. Untouched golden sand covered the floor as far as eyes could see. A gentle, soothing breeze rustled through people’s hair all the time. It was beautiful.
There, a waitress caught my eye. Katherine noticed that. Why was she so insecure? Talking about insecurities… having witnessed it all my life given its frequent platitude, never did I really stop to observe and ponder over it as congruously as I did this time with Kathy. Complexes, insecurities, strange jealousy, bitterness, discontent, and suspicion are so extremely loud that they hurt the ears and so extremely abundant that they hurt the eyes. Anything can be hidden but this? Why was she so? Or was it me? Was I the one feeling insecure?
Anyways, was I really to blame if that waitress captivated me? I felt like a caged sparrow with Katherine. My soul couldn’t be trapped. It wasn’t made to be trapped.
One night, I returned late at the hotel to find that someone was trying to murder Katherine. He looked just like me when he removed his mask but who was he? He was assassinating her like an animal. I felt like an animal that night and animals don’t know sin, do they? I was scared. I knew that if I wasn’t scared, something was wrong because the thrill is what’s scary. All I could tell people was that Katherine had disappeared just like her parents. Who that mysterious man was, that I had no idea about. I felt more and more madness. After all, sometimes an appropriate response to reality is to go insane.
Here I am now, in the lobby of the hotel room. A gentleman as I am, I greet that waitress in my deep, enchanting voice. I think about that man whom I had witnessed murdering Katherine, her nosy parents, my two wives before Kathy and countless other young ladies. Who was he? How would a polite, well-educated and refined man like me know about him, though? But why was I feeling an uneasy, agonizing guilt heating up in my chest? I ignore these thoughts. I go up to that waitress in order to ask her out.
Perhaps, she is the next girl who needs saving from the murderer. Who knows?
