Prologue:
A pounding of footsteps. Splashing of leathered feet in
puddles. A sound reminiscent of cobblestones. The killer dashes
towards the sleek building at the end of the street. Not a
highrise. More of townhouse. But how slick and grey. Quiet and
forboding.
Like me.
, the killer thinks feverishly. His satchel swings
at his side bumping into his leg. He has been running for a great
distance but, he is not out of breath when he reaches the base of
the building. He looks up at the one lit window. He knows that
soon a shadowy form will pass in front of the window. When she
passes by, he will begin. He kneels to the cold sidewalk and
opens the satchel. It is brown and tattered, but through the
killers eyes he is holding a sleek black briefcase. It has lockes
at either end and he fumbles the combination into them. Reaching
into the satchel he pulls out a book. Half of the cover is ripped
off and it reads
A Tale of T
. Through the killers eyes, he is
holding a gentle black volume with gold letters enscribes in
cursive reading
Carnage and Beauty: A Manual
. He opens the
volume and thumbs through untill he reaches a chapte entitled
. He looks at the window again. A shadowy figure passes
An excerpt from
Carnage and Beauty
I have founds knives to be especially
wonderful as they tend to produce a smooth
thin feeling for me. They are not especially
quick but then the sooner the goal is reached,
the sooner a new subject is needed. I have
found that starting with the arms tends to be
a decent start. Several long shallow cuts
tend to make the subject more angry then
fearful, thusly when the realization of
imminent death settles in, they are quite
surprised and responsive. From the arms, I
find myself making quite a step forward by
opening the abdominal area completely. This
is impressive for the subject because the are
forced to press both hands tightly to the
stomach area to prevent the lower major organs
from slipping out. And leaving the face, head
, and throat open for exploration. Severing
the bridge of the nose appears to be a painful
area for the subject but there is a noticeable
lack of blood vessels. The moment of death
begins with the throat and progresses to a
final thought of terror. One sharp movement
downward and forward will sever nearly halfway
through the neck, piercing the windpipe and
stopping just short of the spinal cord. The
decapitation must be finished immediately
after the opening of the jugular vein to
prevent excessive blood loss. It is extremely
important to look directly into the heads eyes
for at least 45 seconds as the brain is still
able to register vision for that amount of
time. This is assures that the subject will
remember the experimenter after death.
From within the satchel, there is a shimmer as the street
light is reflected. The killer moves to the door, eases the knife
from the satchel and slides to the door, all the while thinking to
himself,
The book, the book, the book. The experimentor should not
derive pleasure from carnage. Carnage is his duty to the
committee. The experimentor should not derive pleasure from
carnage. Carnage is not an act of pleasure. You will perform your
duty of carnage with efficiency and speed. You will follow the
precise order of events dictated by the manual. You will not stop.
I will not stop. I will do my duty.
I don
t know why I ever started this job. It
s a long dirty
rotten thankless job, but I do it. It do it every day like I
done it for the past 15 fucking years. And I do a good job at. I
think it
s nights like this that I do it for. It
s a movie night
for me. It
s cold, wet, foggy. I
m in a dank smoggy city with too
many lights on at night. There
s a killer on the loose, a dead
woman in an upstairs apartment. I
ve got a styrofoam cup of bad
coffee from a diner in my hand. Christ, I feel like going home and
getting a really big gun and trenchcoat and hanging out in alley
badgering a prostitute for clues. But that
s not how we do things.
m going to be here in 3 in the fucking morning sweeping this dead
girls apartment. There isn
t going to be a leggy brunette and a
bottle of burbon when I get home. They
ll probably even make me
take pictures. And then I
ll have to go chase the bastard who did
it if we find anything on him. I
ll be lucky to get home at all
and if I do, I
m not even going to get undressed. I
m going to
fall on my counch and sleep for a fucking month. The only thing in
this crazy game that
s like the movies is my ratty apartment. You
know how in the movies, the hero smokes too much and lives in a
little dingy apartment with dirty dishes and clothes and chinese
food boxes strewn every where. The only sign that the dump is
lived in is that fact that the guy comes home to it. Well that
me. I don
t even like chinese food all that much. It
s cheap
though. And I don
t smoke anymore. I
ve even managed to develop
what one might call an aversion to cigarete smoke. I used to know
a weasily little guy who used to carry a small battery operated fan
with him everywhere, and if someone started smoking by him, he blow
their smoke back in their face. They found him in a ditch. One
bullet through each eye. They purposefully used a weak gun so the
bullet wouldn
t go out of the back of his head. So it
d rattle
around in his brain. So it goes. And you ask,
why do you do this
. I say, for the fucking travel. I don
t know. It
s just
what I do. Antelopes run really fast. Ask them why. You know
what they
ll do. If you get to close they
ll run away. That
what they do. Like I said though, it
s nights like this that I
live for. We haven
t had a true nutso here for a long time. Small
time out of town hippies with a lid of pot get boring after a
while. Of course a guy like this, I get nervous chasing. He
carved this girl up with a knife. But it was no precise and you
can tell that she was alive until he cut her head off. It was
almost ritualized. You have to wonder what makes a guy like that
do the things he does. It
d make a hell of book. Of course a book
like that would never get any respect. It
d go up with the rest of
the true crime trash novels like
Human Vampire in L.A.: Young
Sociopath With a Taste for Blood
and crap like that. I think back
to all of the disgusting things I
ve seen and I wonder if anybody
could do something like that, if i could do something like that, or
if it takes something special. Some sort of imbalance. Sometimes
though I almost think I could do it. If I detached myself. It
be harder to do it to someone I knew. But I
m good at detaching
myself. I have to do. It
s in the job description. I can
t start
crying and throwing up everytime I have to help pull a missing 12
year old out of a river in four pieces. This is shit world.
Someone
s got to play garbage man in it. I guess that
s what I do.
I don
t like it, but I sure as hell can
t do anything else. Catch
22. Damned if I do. Damned if I don