The MURDER JOURNALS
new murder fiction
a symphony by
snakeappletree
©2011 ©2014
based on a true story
PREFACE April 2017
(ten years after the Murder Journals)
I have written literally hundreds of stories and novels. A small percentage of them are available online. There is a regular readership numbering hundreds of people to whom I am grateful. That people return to read my new work makes it worth being a writer.
I am concerned that certain people have judged and labelled me based on one story I wrote a decade ago while drunk. It is not a typical example of my work. This particular story specifically contains the phrases “this is a work of fiction” and “the personalities and opinions of the characters are not those of the writer.” This has been there since the first draft.
Despite that, people believe that it is autobiographic and that the activities of the fictional characters are myself. Of the (it by now numbers thousands according to the website data) of people who have read this story, a small number of them who happen to know me in real life, those who have no interest in the main bulk and focus of my writing, concentrate instead on manipulating the story so as to find an excuse to hate me for having written it. These people are not empaths or they would have got the point.
The story is written in first person perspective (“I did this, I did that” as opposed to “he did this / they did that” third person) because the immediate bridge between the character and the reader - the reader is literally in the mind of the character, the character is literally in the mind of the reader. This is done knowingly on purpose and has no indication that the writer is narcissistic and can only write about himself. It is a fictional character as stated. The exploration is in the relationship between mind and emotions and how this affects relationships with others around us.
Writing is primarily for the dual purpose of entertainment and education. It is a distraction but also imparts knowledge, often from experience, even within fiction. It gives us opportunity to explore common human themes and experiences in a safe way. Thus we come to know society, each other and ourselves, better.
To judge a writer on one book is not to know that writer. To label the writer as being the same as a fictional character is a form of self delusion. Projecting a strawman identity onto a person is dehumanising. Empathic people do not typically dehumanise others, they are overwhelmed by sharing the emotions and being of others. While this does express a strong reason why I became a writer, it does not express that I am therefore as a result the same or aspiring toward being the same of any particular fictitious character.
“I read you book.” She said almost as an accusation given the multi-textured tone of her voice, questioning and respecting and judging. Evidently it has had some sort of impact on her.
“Oh, which one?” I ask genuinely because, have written a lot of books.
“The one everyone is talking about.”
“Everyone?” I know which one she means, it is the one a few other people have mentioned to me also. I moved into a new town and word went around that I am an aspiring writer and one of my stories is online. In the years which followed half the town has read it and labelled me based on it. They ignore the 99% of the rest of my writing. The story they are talking about is not typical of my main focus. People who read my science fiction typically do not live in the same town as me.
And yet it is the story I am being judged on by the locals. They assume the protagonist to be a version of myself. I am fed up of explaining to people that the word fiction means ‘not real’ and the words ‘characters opinions are not the opinion of the writer’ means just that.
“What did you think of it?”
“Interesting.”
It’s the only feedback I ever have about that particular story. A dozen people have told me the same thing. It is interesting.
“How so?”
But nobody answers this. By now they assume I am asking because I want my ego boosted and they are deciding that I am an egotist for even asking for them to continue explaining a topic they themselves brought up in the first place.
“You should read my mature stuff, it’s totally different and a lot better. It more accurately reflects what I am about.” Standard pet phrase by this stage of the game.
“Maybe.” But none of them do.
“I attempted to make something which goes further than skin deep. Because true communication does that. And people where I live have difficulty with it.” This statement is closer to achieving communication than anything else I ever wrote.
So what should I do? Should I delete the offensive article which the town I live in is inaccurately judging me for? Should I accept that I am surrounded by people who do not have the empathy to get the story nor me? I should definitely use this lesson to make myself a better writer. That’s all I can do really.
Well I could edit The Murder Journals. It is not yet as envisaged. An exploration of the character Crow through his psychology and various emotions does not really come over. There are no conclusions to the open-case chapters and stories being told, which by the way became a plot device, the reader must use a faculty of detection to fill in the gaps. My own criticism of the novella is very different from that of others who happen upon it. See what you make of it.
Snake Apple Tree
(ten years after the Murder Journals)
I have written literally hundreds of stories and novels. A small percentage of them are available online. There is a regular readership numbering hundreds of people to whom I am grateful. That people return to read my new work makes it worth being a writer.
I am concerned that certain people have judged and labelled me based on one story I wrote a decade ago while drunk. It is not a typical example of my work. This particular story specifically contains the phrases “this is a work of fiction” and “the personalities and opinions of the characters are not those of the writer.” This has been there since the first draft.
Despite that, people believe that it is autobiographic and that the activities of the fictional characters are myself. Of the (it by now numbers thousands according to the website data) of people who have read this story, a small number of them who happen to know me in real life, those who have no interest in the main bulk and focus of my writing, concentrate instead on manipulating the story so as to find an excuse to hate me for having written it. These people are not empaths or they would have got the point.
The story is written in first person perspective (“I did this, I did that” as opposed to “he did this / they did that” third person) because the immediate bridge between the character and the reader - the reader is literally in the mind of the character, the character is literally in the mind of the reader. This is done knowingly on purpose and has no indication that the writer is narcissistic and can only write about himself. It is a fictional character as stated. The exploration is in the relationship between mind and emotions and how this affects relationships with others around us.
Writing is primarily for the dual purpose of entertainment and education. It is a distraction but also imparts knowledge, often from experience, even within fiction. It gives us opportunity to explore common human themes and experiences in a safe way. Thus we come to know society, each other and ourselves, better.
To judge a writer on one book is not to know that writer. To label the writer as being the same as a fictional character is a form of self delusion. Projecting a strawman identity onto a person is dehumanising. Empathic people do not typically dehumanise others, they are overwhelmed by sharing the emotions and being of others. While this does express a strong reason why I became a writer, it does not express that I am therefore as a result the same or aspiring toward being the same of any particular fictitious character.
“I read you book.” She said almost as an accusation given the multi-textured tone of her voice, questioning and respecting and judging. Evidently it has had some sort of impact on her.
“Oh, which one?” I ask genuinely because, have written a lot of books.
“The one everyone is talking about.”
“Everyone?” I know which one she means, it is the one a few other people have mentioned to me also. I moved into a new town and word went around that I am an aspiring writer and one of my stories is online. In the years which followed half the town has read it and labelled me based on it. They ignore the 99% of the rest of my writing. The story they are talking about is not typical of my main focus. People who read my science fiction typically do not live in the same town as me.
And yet it is the story I am being judged on by the locals. They assume the protagonist to be a version of myself. I am fed up of explaining to people that the word fiction means ‘not real’ and the words ‘characters opinions are not the opinion of the writer’ means just that.
“What did you think of it?”
“Interesting.”
It’s the only feedback I ever have about that particular story. A dozen people have told me the same thing. It is interesting.
“How so?”
But nobody answers this. By now they assume I am asking because I want my ego boosted and they are deciding that I am an egotist for even asking for them to continue explaining a topic they themselves brought up in the first place.
“You should read my mature stuff, it’s totally different and a lot better. It more accurately reflects what I am about.” Standard pet phrase by this stage of the game.
“Maybe.” But none of them do.
“I attempted to make something which goes further than skin deep. Because true communication does that. And people where I live have difficulty with it.” This statement is closer to achieving communication than anything else I ever wrote.
So what should I do? Should I delete the offensive article which the town I live in is inaccurately judging me for? Should I accept that I am surrounded by people who do not have the empathy to get the story nor me? I should definitely use this lesson to make myself a better writer. That’s all I can do really.
Well I could edit The Murder Journals. It is not yet as envisaged. An exploration of the character Crow through his psychology and various emotions does not really come over. There are no conclusions to the open-case chapters and stories being told, which by the way became a plot device, the reader must use a faculty of detection to fill in the gaps. My own criticism of the novella is very different from that of others who happen upon it. See what you make of it.
Snake Apple Tree
Book 1: the MURDER JOURNAL
I knew the victim.
It looked like suicide.
I knew the killers.
And they know I know, and that I said nothing.
"You're owed a favour," they told me as a parting shot when I left the city.
Told in such a way the word 'favour' was a threat as much a gift.
In German 'geft' means poison, I always remember that.
These were isolated incidents involving different crews, I guess its true what they say that a killer knows a killer. It started with a loner and a few complicit mates who worked it out and shared the load. And of course the gravity and tone, the eye contact and lack of it, the telling silence not quite right for funeral respect, carrying a different and unique texture that I untwisted through cold hours until I knew for sure, and kept my senses open wide for clues and affirmations.
They came.
I tasted all of this. By hook and by crook have been respected enough to have been left alone for keeping secret what I know; until now. Perhaps they didn't guess how much I've sussed them.
The second incident, the second death of a friend by suicide in mysterious circumstances, it was a different group of people but being a big city made of small communities, the overlaps were inevitable.
Overlapping rings were unified by only a few, not always those who stood as axles but in the rippling ru, the vera pisces; yet when fate casts its hand and situations shape themselves which can mean only one thing, and midnight conversation turns through cryptic testing, when doublethink matches patterns with definite suspicion; wry smiles that perhaps this fucker is in on it and perhaps that means I am admitting to awareness, which endangers me.
And when you know, you know undoubtedly. And nothing more needs saying because silent revelation says it all, black eyes sparkling in moonless night time acceptance. We all have counterparts, an analysis of which deepens the etch as stories overlap.
"Yeah we all knew him, he was cool, went thru a lot, fell in with a wrong crowd, kept himself to himself, went paranoid, mental health, nobody believed him, suicide yeah, sad I know all he needed was a steady sex partner, no he wasn't gay, could have had anyone was too afraid to go for it, shame, did you hear about his suicide note? They say it wasn't his writing. Did you hear about his last facebook post? It said they were going to off him and make it look like accident."
"Mysterious to the last. I wonder what really happened. Cops shut the case. He was in too deep. Tortured artist figure."
He told me who was going to kill him. He'd seen it in a dream.
That was the last time I saw him, a few weeks before they found him.
And my other mate, well he basically just knew too much and was too much a risk to the wrong people.
City syndicates are networks through all tiers of society, all tiers from top to bottom. Its a crew a family they cover their backs and back each other up. I was fringe but it was deep enough; outsiders called me a gangster and the outfit called me a scapegoat. I know a few names and faces but nothing really.
A cop report would get me done because the cops are part of the crew its how it works in real world.
So when my mates started turning up dead, bit by bit I got the hint, time to get out of town. From gangland murders to lone killers to cliques covering for buddies. I'm no expert in the subject but looking back, looking back on it I remember the beautiful memories where the victim, the killer and myself laughed together and did whatever worthy of a story worth retelling.
I remember newbies looking up to me as an inner circle in the know and I remember the inner circle looking at me and wondering how much I'd sussed them. I got out of town before it was my turn to turn up dead.
Murdering someone is a big life choice and doing it for no reason other than to get away with it is their game, some of the players. So they develop strategy that maximize their chance of success and the master strategy is a long term subtle driving of somebody to depression so if they don't top themselves; their apparent suicide is believable because everyone knows they were down and suffering. Long term mental health, delusions, you know the profile. Professionals they are mate. They get away with murder.
I won't write a treatise on how to grind people down, methods of depression, creation of psychosis. It would be an evil thing. Even publishing this text is going to freak out over a dozen people who can track me and likely I'll be found overdosed at some point afterward.
"He did it to himself!" they'll say. "His fiction was too real and he pissed off all the wrong people. He was asking for it."
Well, it has to be said that I am not. I want to stay alive to read my grandkids bedtime tales of magick and love and optimism.
Its how they do it, a certain type who play games with you, destabilize your mind in the name of saving you by deconditioning your misery-inducing programming. Turn you into a paranoid depressive, a recluse, a target, a victim. A suicidal tendency, we all know the signs. But a new type also exists, are emerging. A cleverness akin to the murderer profile outlined above. If I ever write a crime fiction novel these will be the precepts for the characters.
You know you're hooked already if you read this far. You know the dark alluring promise of a mystery involving death and risk, that makes you feel alive and fascinates the primal killer instinct that skin-deep face-value polite society represses, this dark calm breathing space of a writer who has turned you on, piqued your interest and is playing with you, psychological fiction. You like it because you can sense the reality here. You like it because you have my phone number and the society I am talking about is the one you live in too, at some level. We overlap; we share the same streets. I saw you in the supermarket. On a bus. Because all this is going on, a world of real killers in your town, two people removed from your own boring routine and safe life where nothing shocking ever shakes you from your bland frustration.
A new type exists who uses all of the above as a smokescreen to get what they want. A depressive who controls by fear. A drama queen who specialises in not wanting to be the center of attention, so as to be it. Its a control game. Certainly, this type is rare and only in a large enough population can they exist, is there a niche for them.
We live in an overpopulated world of disposable consumer item people and some of them want to be victims. What difference does it make, removing a black hole from society when our overpopulation is a resource war problem pressing ever closer, so the mad tv brainwash machine keeps telling us, and that's ten bucks for your Attention. Don't worry you'll get away with it; most of them have no attention span any more anyway. Even the paperwork don't add up and bounces like an unchecked cheque.
So we slip memes into novels for them to read and concepts to toy with, and we cruelly turn the pages of their brains just for the thrill of it because if you've read this far, you really do have nothing else to lose, and very little worth living for anyway. Have you identified yet the tone has changed and we're on a heavy downer together? The drugs kicked in while I was writing and I want to share with you where I'm at. I want to do this because I need you to rescue me. I need satisfaction as much as anyone and this text message culture of emotional disturbance is about the best recreation we have, truth be told.
Example, text message inbox; 'You know I want you to rape me I have made it plainly clear' and 'I'm laying here ...on the bed with a half bottle of whisky and some pills and a phone to type my message and my free hand keeps touching myself while I think of you'.
So I read the words and realise the person is desperate and needs a fuck.
And my lips soften with the memory of pressing against a sex organ, and I know I'll regret going and I know I'll regret staying, so I keep typing my story and trying to ignore the prods and pokes and tingling I can feel in my own body and from the phone as the text message alert buzzes, and wondering how many people got a copy of that message and if anyone is going to phone. 'No there's only you' the words lie on my screen.
"Yeah these are deadbeats" says the cop monitoring the crime syndicate as he watches the texts fly back and forth, his free hand in his pants and his other on the mouse of his corporate computer cop hacker software that can see everything. But he doesn't hit the alarm because there's no crime by common law and he's too busy getting off on their text conversation to pay attention to the subtext that once again sex has slipped into the equation when he's trying to fathom out a murder mystery. And he's laughing because he's been guaranteed a slut of his own by the outfit if he turns a blind eye to the targets real life activities, which is difficult when his off duty partner is constable Rotwieler who is out to get the lot of them.
"Yeah, he's sinking" says some apparently random psychic observer commenting on my settling down into a groove as the story progresses.
My ex put me up to this. And then a mate. I guess they were talking together too because the vibe is so similar, or maybe its just the I like obsessive goth chicks who have a thing for the dark side.
Yeah man this story is about me again, I have to admit it because partly I want you to text me that you are a desperate as I am slut who wants me, partly because that narcissism streak is a meme of the consumerist choice-making decision personality of the killer profile in question; and partly because if my days are numbered I can write what I want and it might as well be something worth remembering by.
I need to stand out as much as I need to sink into the shadows. I need you to text YES at me and lay there and take it.
The autopsy of my mate didn't even go into her sex life. I am so glad I took the condom home with me that night instead of throwing it in her bin or on her floor or wherever. Always trust your instinct. I want that on my gravestone. Always trust your instinct. Every person at every layer of society can relate to the truth of that and it will usually always get you through more than any clever or any emo flow. Instinct is where it is at, we are instinct. The killer knows this more pure than anyone else.
If I hadn't left when I did she might still be alive now. She might not have cried at how shit her life was, swallowed a box of tramadol on the dregs of a bottle of whisky and lights out. She told me her dealer was coming over with her trammies and she didn't really want me around to meet him. I guessed she was fucking him too. I know the guy already, that's something I didn't let on. He ... its a difficult thing to write about. He'll read this and he'll know I'm onto him. The cop told me after they bundled me into the van; "We know he did it."
And I played dumb. I didn't even confess to shagging the girl. There was no need to and its none of their damn business anyway. Constable Rotwieler had pissed me off by his attitude problem and I had better things to do than hang out in the cop shop giving forced statements about girls I hardly knew.
I tried to remember our text convo and thankfully it was minimalist. I was off the hook because I'd told her I didn't want it that night, I had been too busy laying on my bed making text notes and swigging whisky to answer her texts, didn't want to get involved. Sobered up enough on the walk over to bone her.
Rotwieler told me he'd read her phone for clues and that's how they'd picked up on me. I played dumb and didn't see the dealer again until by coincidence around a mates house some weeks later. "Did you hear about..."
We both shared a glum look and hid secrets behind sorrow. He's a pro he has no guilt reflex but he picked up on mine. She must have said something to him.
"She thought you were sweet." He told me, studying me hard.
"She told me you're a cunt" would have surprised me less and would also have been more honest a reply than the twisted smile I gave him and a sneer and a sigh. I studied him back and noticed the bead of sweat on his temple and how his breathing had changed.
He passed me the bottle of whiskey our host had placed in his hands. "Well here's to absent friends." I announced, swigged and passed it back again. I watched him nod and swig and make hasty excuses and leave. He didn't even pick up his expensive car keys that he had oh so confidently thrown on the low coffee table when he made a grand entrance. Our host had to run out to see him about some business and left me in the flat with his cute kitten girlfriend.
"You knew her well?" She asked me.
"Yeah I knew her, not well." Maybe I had known her better than anyone else and maybe the shallow shell of a broken soul I had known was the sum total extent of her. How would I know any beyond that? Apart from her passion for cock rock and black clothes was there any more to her anyway?
"In the end love, its the memories we bother to make that people remember us for." I announced like some fucking prophet of experience.
She was younger than me by a few years and sucked up to it. "Wow that's intense. You've been through a lot hun. I can get your number out of his phone when he's not looking." He'd left it on the table in his haste to chase the dealer. People are so sloppy. "I'd like to text chat with you." All that sort of shit.
So I wrote all this memory down that might make sense or not, I don't care the whiskeys hitting in now warmly. And the dealer will read it and so will my mate and people will wonder what the fuck I'm up to blah ha ha just being pissed mate basically and telling it as it is to stir rotweener into action and put the chill on a guy who might or might not have killed a girl I was shagging some time ago who is dead now because she couldn't get it together. And that's the story she had to tell in life and that's how I remember her. I'm probably the only one who ever will. It puts a life into perspective when you know it to the end. For better or worse, she did her mission here just like the rest of us. In Islam they teach that God chooses when we die and who are we to go against the will of God?
That's all I can really bring myself to say in remembrance other than her funeral was shit because the police presence and that she was fucking good in bed when she could be bothered. Downers man they're called that for a reason. So the pattern sets and the tale turns and things are more complex than writing about them makes them seem to the reader, perhaps because emotions get involved and skew our objectivity.
Why the fuck did rotweener tell me they suspected the dealer did it? When the coroner report said death by drug overdose. Was he playing head-games with me or pushing me for a reaction or testing my reaction? It doesn't bare worth thinking about except we do and you probably will too now lol.
She wasn't the first murder covered up made to look like suicide I knew but she was the closest to me. I don't want to write about the others because it will pick at healing wounds. I don't think the dealer did it because he's not the same sort of killer psyche as the others.
What is emerging is the victim class who shout "they're going to kill me and make it look like suicide" just because they want the attention. And if you have read this and are anything near half sussed you'll be questioning if that's what I'm doing myself, and why I'm writing this for in the first place.
I don't know, man.
I'm halfway down a bottle and I don't know any more and my phone text keeps putting me off and diverting my attention.
PART TWO
And it was perfect and it should have ended there. I wrote the headline after what is now 'part one'. If this manuscript could be cut short in its prime to preserve its perfect ideal beauty, that's the place to end it.
If your life could be encapsulated as completed just by a single perfect moment, what would that be? What would that moments essence taste of and what pictures would be painted onto a tarot card describing it? Can you decide for yourself, or should the killer make such a choice for you? Ah, now you see: our killer is a poet. But I went for overkill and carried on, flogging a dead horse to bring you paling stale years of promiscuous prose because I'm bored and because perhaps this tale is not yet fully told as deeply as it could be. So many people desire more life, mistaking longevity for quality.
The sick thing is you've read stuff like this before. And probably less cheesy. And probably second drafted. What you have to ask is, if I have killed someone or driven them to it, would I be showing off by writing about it? Or is it more likely I'm an isolated bystander, an observer coming to terms with what I know, in the way that makes sense to me which as an aspiring writer who has been through a whole lot of hell. Writing is self counseling, sharing the weight of living in a world where, these bitches get me thinking man really they do.
They get me feeling. And they chill me out, that's the scary thing, I find inner peace when I'm contemplating murderers. I share the girls fascination with it. I started writing this after a brief text message convo with her recently. Hold on a moment and I'll copy paste some of it for you, only my bits because the data protection act.
Rotweener for all his nasty attitude is surprisingly observant enough to make note for my psyche profile, that I am needing to share; a sign of guilt or shame or what? Undecided but that I am willing to share - need to offload - despite clamming up in the copshop.
Perhaps I shouldn't write this but I have recently had to admit to myself and accept that it turns me on that my ex is a slut and it makes me want her even more. This is relevant here because when I self-identified with the revelation, it made me see the whole from a much wider perspective, and a lot of repression went away. Its a healing thing.
Perhaps its all the grimy cop attention on me right now as I write. The observer affecting the observed; I always was sensitive despite appearing aloof. Perhaps I'm just feeling safer with being a pervert. I was raised by christian control bullshit guilt-sex reflex. That might have a lot to do with it. The anger and repression those fuckers have involved with sex is so messed up. Its actually a very good strong natural thing, not a perversion at all. We're designed for it after all. Read your Jared Diamond.
The perverts are the ones repressing other people and who have issues dealing with open sexuality and freedom and loving their loved ones to have awesome lives lived to the full.
The relationship between the killer instinct, murderers and sluts, is entwined in human psyche. If there's a core to this body of writing then that's it. Although not all the killers I have known have been sexually provoked.
Does a murderer get turned on by murdering and escaping justice? Is murder itself a form of justice in a crazy overpopulated society? The original batman killed his enemies.
Rotweener makes note 'suspect identifies himself as comic book anti-hero'.
"I have been reading about a type of abusive psychosis (Parental Alienation Syndrome) its what I have been dealing with recently. As for murder... My other ex four years ago dumped me for a guy who just got 18 years. Both these women told me I'm not hard enough for them. So I guess I have to be tougher with the next one. Life teaches us by making us live the stories we live."
"Yes men are complicated because we don't fully understand what's happening inside of us and because women, mothers, raise men to be under female control which is the species defense balance against men killing and raping women. We do have a natural predator instinct, both genders do. I have noticed that women often anger their men to try control it and to try get violent sex from the man. So the link between anger, sex and violence exists. All base chakra issues. With psychopaths, cold and emotionless killers, its a different thing."
Hey you didn't think my text messages were all pornographic content did you? Lmao...
If I write this and then she dies, the cops will frame me for it. If I write this and publish it online, people will mostly ignore it. Perhaps someone will be inspired enough by my efforts to throw themselves under my train of thought and writhe lustfully while I kill them the old fashioned way, which is what I need and what I ignore because I don't want to get caught up with anybody anymore. Not now my life is in the shape its in.
She'd have to be someone dark and disposable but fun enough to keep me coming back for more. You know that yo-yo was invented as a weapon for killing kangaroo? Fun enough I'd want another go before I kill her off completely. Its funny but if there's sex games to balance out the murder games then it would be a relationship worth dying for. From where I am looking at it today. She didn't text me back tonight, I should have replied to her instead of ignoring her. She's possibly a little freaked although her replies were sorted. She's intelligent and that's amazing, I am fed up with talking with inferiors. If there's a rule of killing that I would abide by, it would have to be not to kill people cleverer than me nor on my wavelength, unless I have to. Offing the dumbo's does society a favour its like wolfs preying on the weak to improve the genetic quality of the prey stock.
A group can only move as fast as its slowest moving member. That's the problem with overpopulation. Too many tv veg heads. You can tell they're irrelevant when all they have to talk about is tv shows and emo games. I don't want to play emo games. I want to jump into bed with sexy girls and kill off the idiot stock and that's pretty much my purpose here now. I'll get caught eventually. Sad thing is the sort of women I'm looking for, they are few and far between. It takes a special type to deal with me. I do have exquisite tastes, you see.
I think perhaps it is time I move to a more highly denser populated area. I seem to have exhausted this town. So its back to social media networking websites, searching for a life partner just like everybody else while flying through an endless stream of deadbeat off-the-shelf consumer-item disposable people just exactly like myself. What the hell else are we here to prove? You know it.
Even if the world don't end because we chopped down all the trees and poisoned all the water, you are going to die anyway. Its happening. Wake up. Wake up and start streamlining the future for our kids generation and preparing them for what its going to be like with no electric, no tv, no mobile phones. Filtering rain and growing root crops because they won't have supermarkets and petrol. Its not even a case of 'the corporation own us all' because the famine and the plague is going to take most of them. So what difference does it make if a handful of us get it on to take out a few losers?
What I am really trying to say here, is that I am looking for somebody to cheer me up and give me sex because I am going stir crazy in solitude. And I bet your life that most people who read that statement will identify with it.
PART 3
'Yes'
she texted me.
And a web profile that seemed hastily thrown together and vaguely appealing and not too far away from home and very suspiciously like the work of a rotweener taking the piss.
So I hid in a nearby tree and texted; 'meet me in the park I'm scared to come in your house'.
She sat on a bench not far from my spy place and I realised she is genuine. I watched her get bored and then I approached.
"I was about to leave." She told me.
"I guess you know the cops are on my case. I had to scope you out." She smiled at me.
She's a fucking bitch, and a pervert, and I do not want to get involved. She gets turned on by the idea of shagging a total stranger who is a murder suspect being hunted by the cops for involvement with the murder of a young girl. She has a death wish, she likes a challenge, she wants the darkness and she doesn't give a flying fuck if I go to jail for the rest of my life.
She doesn't give a shit about my ex who is dead now. She just needs to fuck an extremist who is as desperate as her and she doesn't want entanglement or a long term relationship either, but if she does end up in one with someone vaguely on her wavelength, its me she has chosen. She might be a murderess. She wants to fuck a murderer. She might be someone who likes playing games and doesn't know how real this is. She wants a baby. I could tell that immediately.
We smiled at each other and hugged like normal people do. Our bodies fitted into a hug surprisingly well. I didn't let her go. She was light as a feather and limp in my arms and she smelled nice.
"I like you too much." I said and finally released her. She held the belt of my overcoat and pulled me close into her.
Surprising. We looked into each others eyes and all of a sudden we were kissing. I was thinking of poison lipstick and realised this is how I want to die. I died and then I realised its a suicide pact because the way she was kissing me her poison lipstick was getting everywhere. A kiss worth dying for. I kissed her back properly and we were taking clothes off each other before we reached her house, at a run, which was only just by the park anyway. We didn't stop kissing, she'd left her door unlocked - suicide wish. We made love on her doormat with the front door open until our feet kicked it shut. It was passionate. When I had nothing left to empty into her and my stamina failed, I collected my coat from her gate in the street and went home. I didn't look back.
My phone text message alert buzzed in my coat pocket while I walked but I didn't check it, yet.
Fucking rotweener was waiting for me by my front door.
"How can I help you officer?" I asked with genuine curiosity. I was suddenly very aware that apart from my boots and the trenchcoat, I was naked, which felt amazing but could prove humiliating in event of my being arrested. I could taste her and smell her and I was so high I almost hugged rotweener with the joys of spring.
"Just a duty call." He said and walked briskly away around the corner. I watched him go with my jaw dropped. What the fuck does that mean? A duty call? That's an aphorism for taking a piss or something. My mind raced. Skeleton key bugged flat dosed cornflakes cop tricks scope surveillance fear intimidation beyond call of duty dirty cop tricks paranoia. Motherfucker.
I read my text message on the doorstep too afraid to go in; 'Thanks'.
I smiled like a grinning idiot, replied 'Anytime'.
Almost instantly she replied 'Now'.
I found a sturdy hollow metal pipe behind my bin that I keep there for just such a circumstance and fearfully searched behind each door and every lurking-size space of the apartment before heating a pizza and writing my notes.
PART 4
Sexually transmitted disease test results back today. She might have killed me after all. She's pregnant. She says it's mine.
I told her she'd get away with murdering a foetus they don't have human rights yet. So she won't speak to me. She wants to keep it. Her actual words were that she wants to kill me for saying that. I told her she's welcome.
She told me my juvenile fiction is shit and I need to grow up. I told her I'm already dead and hung up on her and went for an std test to take my mind off the scary reality of adult responsibilities.
Results back today. Having craved a darkness infinite and definitive as death for so long, having been so morbid and heavy with involvement in the undercrust dregs of a septic scab society where social and emotional decay are the norm that most struggle fruitlessly to overcome, the prison trap of disposable consumer culture a vampire plague upon the world, and now I've pulled another soul down here into this hell world to go through the same turmoil as the rest of us. More than anything I feel guilt. Why do I feel guilt? Is it because I know I'm a self-obsessed deadbeat with a fucked up life and totally unready to be a dad?
Serial killers are meticulously clever and I have already screwed up by posting this thread in public on the internet. Not only will I now be busted if/as/when I do kill her, I will also be busted if someone else kills her first. I already explained how we live in a society where I have known several murderers. At least one of them is likely to do her in as a joke. These fuckers have got a sick sense of humor.
I should go and see her.
PART 5
I have spent hours being in interrogated and I need sleep. They released me without charge. I feel emotionally fucked up. This is a cheap society.
PART 6
I hope you enjoy my fiction.
EPILOGUE
I feel it necessary to spell it out for the real dumbos who made it this far that when a writer of fiction writes 'in character' that it does not necessarily represent the real personality nor beliefs of the writer.
It looked like suicide.
I knew the killers.
And they know I know, and that I said nothing.
"You're owed a favour," they told me as a parting shot when I left the city.
Told in such a way the word 'favour' was a threat as much a gift.
In German 'geft' means poison, I always remember that.
These were isolated incidents involving different crews, I guess its true what they say that a killer knows a killer. It started with a loner and a few complicit mates who worked it out and shared the load. And of course the gravity and tone, the eye contact and lack of it, the telling silence not quite right for funeral respect, carrying a different and unique texture that I untwisted through cold hours until I knew for sure, and kept my senses open wide for clues and affirmations.
They came.
I tasted all of this. By hook and by crook have been respected enough to have been left alone for keeping secret what I know; until now. Perhaps they didn't guess how much I've sussed them.
The second incident, the second death of a friend by suicide in mysterious circumstances, it was a different group of people but being a big city made of small communities, the overlaps were inevitable.
Overlapping rings were unified by only a few, not always those who stood as axles but in the rippling ru, the vera pisces; yet when fate casts its hand and situations shape themselves which can mean only one thing, and midnight conversation turns through cryptic testing, when doublethink matches patterns with definite suspicion; wry smiles that perhaps this fucker is in on it and perhaps that means I am admitting to awareness, which endangers me.
And when you know, you know undoubtedly. And nothing more needs saying because silent revelation says it all, black eyes sparkling in moonless night time acceptance. We all have counterparts, an analysis of which deepens the etch as stories overlap.
"Yeah we all knew him, he was cool, went thru a lot, fell in with a wrong crowd, kept himself to himself, went paranoid, mental health, nobody believed him, suicide yeah, sad I know all he needed was a steady sex partner, no he wasn't gay, could have had anyone was too afraid to go for it, shame, did you hear about his suicide note? They say it wasn't his writing. Did you hear about his last facebook post? It said they were going to off him and make it look like accident."
"Mysterious to the last. I wonder what really happened. Cops shut the case. He was in too deep. Tortured artist figure."
He told me who was going to kill him. He'd seen it in a dream.
That was the last time I saw him, a few weeks before they found him.
And my other mate, well he basically just knew too much and was too much a risk to the wrong people.
City syndicates are networks through all tiers of society, all tiers from top to bottom. Its a crew a family they cover their backs and back each other up. I was fringe but it was deep enough; outsiders called me a gangster and the outfit called me a scapegoat. I know a few names and faces but nothing really.
A cop report would get me done because the cops are part of the crew its how it works in real world.
So when my mates started turning up dead, bit by bit I got the hint, time to get out of town. From gangland murders to lone killers to cliques covering for buddies. I'm no expert in the subject but looking back, looking back on it I remember the beautiful memories where the victim, the killer and myself laughed together and did whatever worthy of a story worth retelling.
I remember newbies looking up to me as an inner circle in the know and I remember the inner circle looking at me and wondering how much I'd sussed them. I got out of town before it was my turn to turn up dead.
Murdering someone is a big life choice and doing it for no reason other than to get away with it is their game, some of the players. So they develop strategy that maximize their chance of success and the master strategy is a long term subtle driving of somebody to depression so if they don't top themselves; their apparent suicide is believable because everyone knows they were down and suffering. Long term mental health, delusions, you know the profile. Professionals they are mate. They get away with murder.
I won't write a treatise on how to grind people down, methods of depression, creation of psychosis. It would be an evil thing. Even publishing this text is going to freak out over a dozen people who can track me and likely I'll be found overdosed at some point afterward.
"He did it to himself!" they'll say. "His fiction was too real and he pissed off all the wrong people. He was asking for it."
Well, it has to be said that I am not. I want to stay alive to read my grandkids bedtime tales of magick and love and optimism.
Its how they do it, a certain type who play games with you, destabilize your mind in the name of saving you by deconditioning your misery-inducing programming. Turn you into a paranoid depressive, a recluse, a target, a victim. A suicidal tendency, we all know the signs. But a new type also exists, are emerging. A cleverness akin to the murderer profile outlined above. If I ever write a crime fiction novel these will be the precepts for the characters.
You know you're hooked already if you read this far. You know the dark alluring promise of a mystery involving death and risk, that makes you feel alive and fascinates the primal killer instinct that skin-deep face-value polite society represses, this dark calm breathing space of a writer who has turned you on, piqued your interest and is playing with you, psychological fiction. You like it because you can sense the reality here. You like it because you have my phone number and the society I am talking about is the one you live in too, at some level. We overlap; we share the same streets. I saw you in the supermarket. On a bus. Because all this is going on, a world of real killers in your town, two people removed from your own boring routine and safe life where nothing shocking ever shakes you from your bland frustration.
A new type exists who uses all of the above as a smokescreen to get what they want. A depressive who controls by fear. A drama queen who specialises in not wanting to be the center of attention, so as to be it. Its a control game. Certainly, this type is rare and only in a large enough population can they exist, is there a niche for them.
We live in an overpopulated world of disposable consumer item people and some of them want to be victims. What difference does it make, removing a black hole from society when our overpopulation is a resource war problem pressing ever closer, so the mad tv brainwash machine keeps telling us, and that's ten bucks for your Attention. Don't worry you'll get away with it; most of them have no attention span any more anyway. Even the paperwork don't add up and bounces like an unchecked cheque.
So we slip memes into novels for them to read and concepts to toy with, and we cruelly turn the pages of their brains just for the thrill of it because if you've read this far, you really do have nothing else to lose, and very little worth living for anyway. Have you identified yet the tone has changed and we're on a heavy downer together? The drugs kicked in while I was writing and I want to share with you where I'm at. I want to do this because I need you to rescue me. I need satisfaction as much as anyone and this text message culture of emotional disturbance is about the best recreation we have, truth be told.
Example, text message inbox; 'You know I want you to rape me I have made it plainly clear' and 'I'm laying here ...on the bed with a half bottle of whisky and some pills and a phone to type my message and my free hand keeps touching myself while I think of you'.
So I read the words and realise the person is desperate and needs a fuck.
And my lips soften with the memory of pressing against a sex organ, and I know I'll regret going and I know I'll regret staying, so I keep typing my story and trying to ignore the prods and pokes and tingling I can feel in my own body and from the phone as the text message alert buzzes, and wondering how many people got a copy of that message and if anyone is going to phone. 'No there's only you' the words lie on my screen.
"Yeah these are deadbeats" says the cop monitoring the crime syndicate as he watches the texts fly back and forth, his free hand in his pants and his other on the mouse of his corporate computer cop hacker software that can see everything. But he doesn't hit the alarm because there's no crime by common law and he's too busy getting off on their text conversation to pay attention to the subtext that once again sex has slipped into the equation when he's trying to fathom out a murder mystery. And he's laughing because he's been guaranteed a slut of his own by the outfit if he turns a blind eye to the targets real life activities, which is difficult when his off duty partner is constable Rotwieler who is out to get the lot of them.
"Yeah, he's sinking" says some apparently random psychic observer commenting on my settling down into a groove as the story progresses.
My ex put me up to this. And then a mate. I guess they were talking together too because the vibe is so similar, or maybe its just the I like obsessive goth chicks who have a thing for the dark side.
Yeah man this story is about me again, I have to admit it because partly I want you to text me that you are a desperate as I am slut who wants me, partly because that narcissism streak is a meme of the consumerist choice-making decision personality of the killer profile in question; and partly because if my days are numbered I can write what I want and it might as well be something worth remembering by.
I need to stand out as much as I need to sink into the shadows. I need you to text YES at me and lay there and take it.
The autopsy of my mate didn't even go into her sex life. I am so glad I took the condom home with me that night instead of throwing it in her bin or on her floor or wherever. Always trust your instinct. I want that on my gravestone. Always trust your instinct. Every person at every layer of society can relate to the truth of that and it will usually always get you through more than any clever or any emo flow. Instinct is where it is at, we are instinct. The killer knows this more pure than anyone else.
If I hadn't left when I did she might still be alive now. She might not have cried at how shit her life was, swallowed a box of tramadol on the dregs of a bottle of whisky and lights out. She told me her dealer was coming over with her trammies and she didn't really want me around to meet him. I guessed she was fucking him too. I know the guy already, that's something I didn't let on. He ... its a difficult thing to write about. He'll read this and he'll know I'm onto him. The cop told me after they bundled me into the van; "We know he did it."
And I played dumb. I didn't even confess to shagging the girl. There was no need to and its none of their damn business anyway. Constable Rotwieler had pissed me off by his attitude problem and I had better things to do than hang out in the cop shop giving forced statements about girls I hardly knew.
I tried to remember our text convo and thankfully it was minimalist. I was off the hook because I'd told her I didn't want it that night, I had been too busy laying on my bed making text notes and swigging whisky to answer her texts, didn't want to get involved. Sobered up enough on the walk over to bone her.
Rotwieler told me he'd read her phone for clues and that's how they'd picked up on me. I played dumb and didn't see the dealer again until by coincidence around a mates house some weeks later. "Did you hear about..."
We both shared a glum look and hid secrets behind sorrow. He's a pro he has no guilt reflex but he picked up on mine. She must have said something to him.
"She thought you were sweet." He told me, studying me hard.
"She told me you're a cunt" would have surprised me less and would also have been more honest a reply than the twisted smile I gave him and a sneer and a sigh. I studied him back and noticed the bead of sweat on his temple and how his breathing had changed.
He passed me the bottle of whiskey our host had placed in his hands. "Well here's to absent friends." I announced, swigged and passed it back again. I watched him nod and swig and make hasty excuses and leave. He didn't even pick up his expensive car keys that he had oh so confidently thrown on the low coffee table when he made a grand entrance. Our host had to run out to see him about some business and left me in the flat with his cute kitten girlfriend.
"You knew her well?" She asked me.
"Yeah I knew her, not well." Maybe I had known her better than anyone else and maybe the shallow shell of a broken soul I had known was the sum total extent of her. How would I know any beyond that? Apart from her passion for cock rock and black clothes was there any more to her anyway?
"In the end love, its the memories we bother to make that people remember us for." I announced like some fucking prophet of experience.
She was younger than me by a few years and sucked up to it. "Wow that's intense. You've been through a lot hun. I can get your number out of his phone when he's not looking." He'd left it on the table in his haste to chase the dealer. People are so sloppy. "I'd like to text chat with you." All that sort of shit.
So I wrote all this memory down that might make sense or not, I don't care the whiskeys hitting in now warmly. And the dealer will read it and so will my mate and people will wonder what the fuck I'm up to blah ha ha just being pissed mate basically and telling it as it is to stir rotweener into action and put the chill on a guy who might or might not have killed a girl I was shagging some time ago who is dead now because she couldn't get it together. And that's the story she had to tell in life and that's how I remember her. I'm probably the only one who ever will. It puts a life into perspective when you know it to the end. For better or worse, she did her mission here just like the rest of us. In Islam they teach that God chooses when we die and who are we to go against the will of God?
That's all I can really bring myself to say in remembrance other than her funeral was shit because the police presence and that she was fucking good in bed when she could be bothered. Downers man they're called that for a reason. So the pattern sets and the tale turns and things are more complex than writing about them makes them seem to the reader, perhaps because emotions get involved and skew our objectivity.
Why the fuck did rotweener tell me they suspected the dealer did it? When the coroner report said death by drug overdose. Was he playing head-games with me or pushing me for a reaction or testing my reaction? It doesn't bare worth thinking about except we do and you probably will too now lol.
She wasn't the first murder covered up made to look like suicide I knew but she was the closest to me. I don't want to write about the others because it will pick at healing wounds. I don't think the dealer did it because he's not the same sort of killer psyche as the others.
What is emerging is the victim class who shout "they're going to kill me and make it look like suicide" just because they want the attention. And if you have read this and are anything near half sussed you'll be questioning if that's what I'm doing myself, and why I'm writing this for in the first place.
I don't know, man.
I'm halfway down a bottle and I don't know any more and my phone text keeps putting me off and diverting my attention.
PART TWO
And it was perfect and it should have ended there. I wrote the headline after what is now 'part one'. If this manuscript could be cut short in its prime to preserve its perfect ideal beauty, that's the place to end it.
If your life could be encapsulated as completed just by a single perfect moment, what would that be? What would that moments essence taste of and what pictures would be painted onto a tarot card describing it? Can you decide for yourself, or should the killer make such a choice for you? Ah, now you see: our killer is a poet. But I went for overkill and carried on, flogging a dead horse to bring you paling stale years of promiscuous prose because I'm bored and because perhaps this tale is not yet fully told as deeply as it could be. So many people desire more life, mistaking longevity for quality.
The sick thing is you've read stuff like this before. And probably less cheesy. And probably second drafted. What you have to ask is, if I have killed someone or driven them to it, would I be showing off by writing about it? Or is it more likely I'm an isolated bystander, an observer coming to terms with what I know, in the way that makes sense to me which as an aspiring writer who has been through a whole lot of hell. Writing is self counseling, sharing the weight of living in a world where, these bitches get me thinking man really they do.
They get me feeling. And they chill me out, that's the scary thing, I find inner peace when I'm contemplating murderers. I share the girls fascination with it. I started writing this after a brief text message convo with her recently. Hold on a moment and I'll copy paste some of it for you, only my bits because the data protection act.
Rotweener for all his nasty attitude is surprisingly observant enough to make note for my psyche profile, that I am needing to share; a sign of guilt or shame or what? Undecided but that I am willing to share - need to offload - despite clamming up in the copshop.
Perhaps I shouldn't write this but I have recently had to admit to myself and accept that it turns me on that my ex is a slut and it makes me want her even more. This is relevant here because when I self-identified with the revelation, it made me see the whole from a much wider perspective, and a lot of repression went away. Its a healing thing.
Perhaps its all the grimy cop attention on me right now as I write. The observer affecting the observed; I always was sensitive despite appearing aloof. Perhaps I'm just feeling safer with being a pervert. I was raised by christian control bullshit guilt-sex reflex. That might have a lot to do with it. The anger and repression those fuckers have involved with sex is so messed up. Its actually a very good strong natural thing, not a perversion at all. We're designed for it after all. Read your Jared Diamond.
The perverts are the ones repressing other people and who have issues dealing with open sexuality and freedom and loving their loved ones to have awesome lives lived to the full.
The relationship between the killer instinct, murderers and sluts, is entwined in human psyche. If there's a core to this body of writing then that's it. Although not all the killers I have known have been sexually provoked.
Does a murderer get turned on by murdering and escaping justice? Is murder itself a form of justice in a crazy overpopulated society? The original batman killed his enemies.
Rotweener makes note 'suspect identifies himself as comic book anti-hero'.
"I have been reading about a type of abusive psychosis (Parental Alienation Syndrome) its what I have been dealing with recently. As for murder... My other ex four years ago dumped me for a guy who just got 18 years. Both these women told me I'm not hard enough for them. So I guess I have to be tougher with the next one. Life teaches us by making us live the stories we live."
"Yes men are complicated because we don't fully understand what's happening inside of us and because women, mothers, raise men to be under female control which is the species defense balance against men killing and raping women. We do have a natural predator instinct, both genders do. I have noticed that women often anger their men to try control it and to try get violent sex from the man. So the link between anger, sex and violence exists. All base chakra issues. With psychopaths, cold and emotionless killers, its a different thing."
Hey you didn't think my text messages were all pornographic content did you? Lmao...
If I write this and then she dies, the cops will frame me for it. If I write this and publish it online, people will mostly ignore it. Perhaps someone will be inspired enough by my efforts to throw themselves under my train of thought and writhe lustfully while I kill them the old fashioned way, which is what I need and what I ignore because I don't want to get caught up with anybody anymore. Not now my life is in the shape its in.
She'd have to be someone dark and disposable but fun enough to keep me coming back for more. You know that yo-yo was invented as a weapon for killing kangaroo? Fun enough I'd want another go before I kill her off completely. Its funny but if there's sex games to balance out the murder games then it would be a relationship worth dying for. From where I am looking at it today. She didn't text me back tonight, I should have replied to her instead of ignoring her. She's possibly a little freaked although her replies were sorted. She's intelligent and that's amazing, I am fed up with talking with inferiors. If there's a rule of killing that I would abide by, it would have to be not to kill people cleverer than me nor on my wavelength, unless I have to. Offing the dumbo's does society a favour its like wolfs preying on the weak to improve the genetic quality of the prey stock.
A group can only move as fast as its slowest moving member. That's the problem with overpopulation. Too many tv veg heads. You can tell they're irrelevant when all they have to talk about is tv shows and emo games. I don't want to play emo games. I want to jump into bed with sexy girls and kill off the idiot stock and that's pretty much my purpose here now. I'll get caught eventually. Sad thing is the sort of women I'm looking for, they are few and far between. It takes a special type to deal with me. I do have exquisite tastes, you see.
I think perhaps it is time I move to a more highly denser populated area. I seem to have exhausted this town. So its back to social media networking websites, searching for a life partner just like everybody else while flying through an endless stream of deadbeat off-the-shelf consumer-item disposable people just exactly like myself. What the hell else are we here to prove? You know it.
Even if the world don't end because we chopped down all the trees and poisoned all the water, you are going to die anyway. Its happening. Wake up. Wake up and start streamlining the future for our kids generation and preparing them for what its going to be like with no electric, no tv, no mobile phones. Filtering rain and growing root crops because they won't have supermarkets and petrol. Its not even a case of 'the corporation own us all' because the famine and the plague is going to take most of them. So what difference does it make if a handful of us get it on to take out a few losers?
What I am really trying to say here, is that I am looking for somebody to cheer me up and give me sex because I am going stir crazy in solitude. And I bet your life that most people who read that statement will identify with it.
PART 3
'Yes'
she texted me.
And a web profile that seemed hastily thrown together and vaguely appealing and not too far away from home and very suspiciously like the work of a rotweener taking the piss.
So I hid in a nearby tree and texted; 'meet me in the park I'm scared to come in your house'.
She sat on a bench not far from my spy place and I realised she is genuine. I watched her get bored and then I approached.
"I was about to leave." She told me.
"I guess you know the cops are on my case. I had to scope you out." She smiled at me.
She's a fucking bitch, and a pervert, and I do not want to get involved. She gets turned on by the idea of shagging a total stranger who is a murder suspect being hunted by the cops for involvement with the murder of a young girl. She has a death wish, she likes a challenge, she wants the darkness and she doesn't give a flying fuck if I go to jail for the rest of my life.
She doesn't give a shit about my ex who is dead now. She just needs to fuck an extremist who is as desperate as her and she doesn't want entanglement or a long term relationship either, but if she does end up in one with someone vaguely on her wavelength, its me she has chosen. She might be a murderess. She wants to fuck a murderer. She might be someone who likes playing games and doesn't know how real this is. She wants a baby. I could tell that immediately.
We smiled at each other and hugged like normal people do. Our bodies fitted into a hug surprisingly well. I didn't let her go. She was light as a feather and limp in my arms and she smelled nice.
"I like you too much." I said and finally released her. She held the belt of my overcoat and pulled me close into her.
Surprising. We looked into each others eyes and all of a sudden we were kissing. I was thinking of poison lipstick and realised this is how I want to die. I died and then I realised its a suicide pact because the way she was kissing me her poison lipstick was getting everywhere. A kiss worth dying for. I kissed her back properly and we were taking clothes off each other before we reached her house, at a run, which was only just by the park anyway. We didn't stop kissing, she'd left her door unlocked - suicide wish. We made love on her doormat with the front door open until our feet kicked it shut. It was passionate. When I had nothing left to empty into her and my stamina failed, I collected my coat from her gate in the street and went home. I didn't look back.
My phone text message alert buzzed in my coat pocket while I walked but I didn't check it, yet.
Fucking rotweener was waiting for me by my front door.
"How can I help you officer?" I asked with genuine curiosity. I was suddenly very aware that apart from my boots and the trenchcoat, I was naked, which felt amazing but could prove humiliating in event of my being arrested. I could taste her and smell her and I was so high I almost hugged rotweener with the joys of spring.
"Just a duty call." He said and walked briskly away around the corner. I watched him go with my jaw dropped. What the fuck does that mean? A duty call? That's an aphorism for taking a piss or something. My mind raced. Skeleton key bugged flat dosed cornflakes cop tricks scope surveillance fear intimidation beyond call of duty dirty cop tricks paranoia. Motherfucker.
I read my text message on the doorstep too afraid to go in; 'Thanks'.
I smiled like a grinning idiot, replied 'Anytime'.
Almost instantly she replied 'Now'.
I found a sturdy hollow metal pipe behind my bin that I keep there for just such a circumstance and fearfully searched behind each door and every lurking-size space of the apartment before heating a pizza and writing my notes.
PART 4
Sexually transmitted disease test results back today. She might have killed me after all. She's pregnant. She says it's mine.
I told her she'd get away with murdering a foetus they don't have human rights yet. So she won't speak to me. She wants to keep it. Her actual words were that she wants to kill me for saying that. I told her she's welcome.
She told me my juvenile fiction is shit and I need to grow up. I told her I'm already dead and hung up on her and went for an std test to take my mind off the scary reality of adult responsibilities.
Results back today. Having craved a darkness infinite and definitive as death for so long, having been so morbid and heavy with involvement in the undercrust dregs of a septic scab society where social and emotional decay are the norm that most struggle fruitlessly to overcome, the prison trap of disposable consumer culture a vampire plague upon the world, and now I've pulled another soul down here into this hell world to go through the same turmoil as the rest of us. More than anything I feel guilt. Why do I feel guilt? Is it because I know I'm a self-obsessed deadbeat with a fucked up life and totally unready to be a dad?
Serial killers are meticulously clever and I have already screwed up by posting this thread in public on the internet. Not only will I now be busted if/as/when I do kill her, I will also be busted if someone else kills her first. I already explained how we live in a society where I have known several murderers. At least one of them is likely to do her in as a joke. These fuckers have got a sick sense of humor.
I should go and see her.
PART 5
I have spent hours being in interrogated and I need sleep. They released me without charge. I feel emotionally fucked up. This is a cheap society.
PART 6
I hope you enjoy my fiction.
EPILOGUE
I feel it necessary to spell it out for the real dumbos who made it this far that when a writer of fiction writes 'in character' that it does not necessarily represent the real personality nor beliefs of the writer.
Book 2: The MURDER PLAN
CHAPTER ONE
I had explained repeatedly to the police that my writing is fictitious. Made up. Imaginary.
The police were having none of it.
"We know that you are using psychological intimidation." Shouted officer Rotweiler at me across the desk. I was momentarily confused because that was precisely a line from my story. The cop was grinning, obviously self-glorifying in his genius ability at being a total fuckwit.
I replied; "I returned home to find the lock on my front door had been tampered with. Some days later I discovered on my bookshelf a Ryan Inkling crime novel belonging to my ex-partner that I know for certain I had already returned to her with the rest of her stuff. It contained a bookmark on page 28 on which the story mentioned cars being sabotaged and people being killed. This came after the events where my car was sabotaged on two separate occasions and members of my ex's family allegedly confessed to it. I have no evidence of this but I did make reports to the police on both occasions. There are IRNs in the police computer database."
"What's an IRN?" Asked officer Lapdog, the 'good cop' called in by Rotwieler to help with the interview - which in my small experience of these matters is unorthodox, as they usually only have one cop do an interview. I suspect its to do with performance related pay.
"Incident Report Number." I replied.
"You sure seem to know a lot about policing." Mentioned Rotwieler.
"Are you on oath, constable?" I asked, genuinely. "And will you honour that oath throughout this meeting?"
Its something I have been trained to say but only now remembered. Had I done so when he picked me up I wouldn't be sitting in this interview room being harassed and intimidated by a guy who brushes the last millimetre of his number three nazi-cut with bleach to give him silver tipped spikes.
I could hear his mind grind to a halt in the shape of the word 'bastard'. Sparks from his clenched teeth or perhaps it was spittle arched across the room as he stared at me with such fierce intensity I thought his beady little eyes were about to fall out. I smiled and nodded toward the tape recorder quietly recording the interview.
To fill the heavy gap of silence that followed I helpfully added that "The novel is called 'A Hood Ganging'. I never liked Ryan Inkling myself. He gave my ex so many ideas about being a more successful criminal that she thought she could get away with anything."
"Are you intimating that your ex partner is involved?" Asked Lapdog. Rottwieler was still seething at me. He hadn't blinked yet and he was now drooling. I was wondering if the tape was picking up the snuffling sound of his rapid and perhaps rabid breathing. I was glad Lapdog was in the room.
"Of course she is involved!" I enthused. "I am not yet quite sure how. I am also not quite yet sure how it is that you believe I did these murders. Rotweiler said they happened this morning and yet I am quite clearly on cctv in town innocently doing my shopping. I knew nothing of it until he arrested me. Wrongful arrest I might add."
I dared to look at Rotweiler again. He finally broke his iron stare, glancing sideways as our eyes met. "The news still hasn't sunk in yet and I am trying to piece together exactly what has happened from the aggressive explainations I have been given here. You are telling me that my ex partners family have been found dead in exactly the same manner as I described in one of the 'short fiction about murder culture' stories recently published on my web blog. It sounds ludicrous. It also looks as if I have been set up. And it also smells like the cops are sniffing in the wrong circuits. Why are you reading my blogs anyway? How did that come to your attention in the first place? Whoever notified you that I am a crime thriller fiction writer on the internet needs investigating themselves, for a start."
"Don't tell me how to do my job!" Snarled Rotweiler.
So I didn't. I sat back and reminisced over the details. I had written the story in question through a haze of whisky and it is not my style to edit my work, nor read it again. So the specifics were not fresh in my mind. If its full of typo's and inacuracies and grammar mistakes then I trust my readers to point it out to me.
"Perhaps its one of my readers?" I suggested. "There's a forum on the website, I have a few ah, I guess you'd call them fans. Other writers. Oddballs. Depressed goths and lonely older women for the most part. Some of them are pretty fucked up, to be honest. Literary types who know what a struggle it is being a writer"
"It's you we are interested in." Rotweiler returned. "At face value I'd say we have an open and shut case. You told the world you planned a grotesque murder, then the murder happened exactly as you had described it."
"Apart from one significant detail: I didn't do it. I have been set up. Or you have a real freak out there who was inspired by my fiction."
"One who knows your family."
"I am at risk officer. I might be being stalked. The killer has already struck. As I have an alibi and am to be considered innocent, I request police protection."
Rotweiler actually laughed. Not a friendly laugh. I have never heard a jackal laugh, but I did hear a hyena on some nature documentary. The policemans laugh was something like that. For poetic depiction.
"So the murderer followed my story description exactly? Wow that's pretty serious!"
Lapdog produced a print out from my website and showed it to me.
"Hey that's copyright evasion that is!" I proclaimed. His unblinking stare was one of infinite patience. I gulped. He began to read aloud.
CHAPTER TWO
removed and rubber stamp marked CLASSIFIED in red ink
CHAPTER THREE
Officer Lapdog stopped reading.
"You have taken that out of context." I advised him.
The police officers said nothing. So I didn't either. Eventually they decided to let me go, on the basis that I had a watertight alibi; my request for the cctv camera tapes from town that day, which is likely to be enough to convince any judge that the cops are trying to set me up.
It was obvious to me that I didn't kill my ex partners family. It was obvious to everybody that somebody who had read my website, had done. Not exactly a copycat killing.
Of course I went straight around to their house to do some investigating of my own. An empty cop car parked opposite. I pulled my hoody up in case it contained a video camera. Figuring I had a right to be innocently knocking on the door and having been cleared as a suspect, I was brave enough to approach the door despite this.
There was no sign of police-tape securing the area like I have seen on tv. Budget cut-backs most probably. The door was ajar. After rigging the mains electric to the doorbell so as to activate the... Apparently it is uncanny how closely the murderer had followed my fictitious methodology. I went inside.
I have smelled death before. I knew a goth chick once who worked in a morgue, she smelled of formaldehyde more than dead bodies but even so, a sort of dryness, at the top of the mouth.
I first smelled death the day I found my grandfather dead in his favourite armchair when I was six years old. I didn't know it at the time of course, I thought he was just sleeping as I sat on his lap and watched tv with him for an hour before my mom got home and screamed the place down. This house stank of it.
I knew the bodies had already been removed from what the cops had told me. What they left behind gave me the creeps and the superstitious idea that I was breathing in corpses exhaling their last. Dead peoples air filling my lungs while I breathed in their space. Sickly yet not exactly accurate since it is emissions from the body that causes the strange smell, not air from the lungs.
If I was directing a textbook format horror movie, this is the moment where a series of scratchy black and white still images of some grotesquery would flash up and lurch at you as almost-subliminal imagery, while I look around the place. It's the first time I have been here truth be told. The house is immaculate, a show home, almost too tidy considering its recent history and how dirty the recently deceased residents are in their activities toward their fellow human beings. No dust on the mantelpiece. No smears on the mirrors. Not even a dog hair around the dog water bowl. Dog now also recently deceased, if the murderer has accurately stuck to the outline given on my website. It doesn't even smell of dog. As I said; deaths scent permeates.
Obviously the bodies had already been removed to a morgue. That it was so obviously a murder by the nature of the deaths provoked further investigation. Provocation being a concept to be highlighted here in several directions. In my story, the purpose for the massacre had been to draw attention to the fact the now deceased family had been getting away with a cruel intimidation campaign. Collectively for several years they had collaborated, victimising an innocent soul, a yoga teacher no less, beyond his breaking point. Pushing the poor sap beyond all reason and into an act of premeditated and psychotic retaliation and uncharacteristic violence.
It had been intended as a study of how people react under specific pressures, and how an ordinary Joe could be made into something he otherwise could never have been. Drawing the reader in through witness eyes, watching the campaign through the eyes of observers at each incident of psychological or emotional abuse. Seemingly unconnected incidents, driving the target increasingly toward paranoia, anger, and finally revenge.
I write crime fiction after I have argued with my ex. That's when the ideas form. She pushes buttons in me, she knows she is doing it, she does it on purpose to piss me off. Usually I roll my eyes and ignore her but some days... well nobody is perfect and some days she gets to me. We were an amazing couple despite her parents clandestine harassment campaign against us. Before she went over to their side and they threw out all the stops. Their disfunctional family need for a victim so as to unify their internal strife's found a perfect target in a man who practises pacifism and will not retaliate.
So I do base my stories events and characters on real life. Writing it down gets it out of my system. Perhaps its a cowards way out but I have much more to live for than acting on such thoughts as the ones she initiates. The pen is mightier than the sword, as they say. Probably from Samurai warrior school, the budo form of zen. Perhaps it was from Yukio Mishima.
Nobody has a house as clean as this, I found myself thinking as I explored upstairs. Its OCD on overdive.
CHAPTER FOUR
I bought a gun today. Took me a few weeks of searching the internet. No smoke without fire. Zippo click ting. Shoot the wings off the flies. Its an air pistol but sh! don't tell anyone. Its still lethal at close quarters. I'm going out to the woods tomorrow to do some target practise.
The gun is silent. Ok so not silent, it makes noise but after watching so much crap hollywood drama with reverb laden special sound effects its a surprise how quiet my new best friend is. In a normal days hustle and bustle in town I am pretty sure nobody would even notice if I discreetly let it off in the high street. Except cctv, that would be a problem. I'll have to get an umbrella.
I got it purely for self defence purposes. I'm beginning to feel like a character in one of my own books. Fiction is usually a heightened version of reality. Everyone is cooler or nastier or whatever. More exaggurated compared to people in real life. Otherwise there'd be no substantial story.
Crow. My name's Crow. It was my fathers name before me and his fathers before him. Technically that three generations is a flock of Crows which of course is a perfect ideology since the specific collective name for Crows is a Murder. Story of my life. I just never thought that all the life I put into my work would turn around and that the stories would start putting their deaths into my life.
I missed my target four times out of five by the way. More target practise tomorrow. The woods is great on a dry day. Fresh air and nature sounds. Refreshing. Exactly what I need. Less dense population so there's more head space for me to expand my senses and chill. Outdoors is good for that. I think I was going stir crazy spending too much time indoors.
Its got me thinking cleanly. I could be anybody I want to be in a story book, living any life I choose. Why not the same in real life? I'm going charity shop browsing tomorrow to see if I can pick up a trenchcoat. The sense of theatrical might add some fun back into my life. A sense of adventure.
"We don't know how far the ripples of our decisions go. You kill one, and maybe save a thousand. That's the code of the Fraternity. That's what we believe in. And that's why we do it."
-Fox, Wanted, universal pictures.
And here I sit, my back to the window, waiting for the bullet to speckle my craptop screen with adrenaline and grade 4 caffeine flavoured moolah. Watching movies about machismo that cost a quid for five in the charity store. My pistol in my lap. Wondering how to make dry ice bullets that leave no nasty let's call them after-stains. Coins as bullets. My names come up on the loom of fate. Left it too late. Feathers of justice.
Last time I went out to a club the bouncers and barstaff and half the clientele had been tipped off by my ex and her hate crews spite crusade that I am some kind of sick fucker, and nobody would speak with me all night. Discreditation campaign took me out. Took my life apart.
Zen has always been the answer. The ones who sucker for her lies are idiots I'm better off without. If that's 99% of everyone then its easier now for me to see who the real people are, the ones on my wavelength, the ones with hearts that do the thinking. It gets lonely though. I'm lonely. The local women know me by a false reputation and won't give me the time of day much less go on a date with me. There's only so much slow, deep, meditation breathing a person can do in a cultural background as stressful as the post post-modern west.
So, now you know Me. The movies boring. So who am I am now? The guy who gets plagiarised off facebook before account deleted and I disappear from your view?
CHAPTER FIVE
This time around there's a chapter five. It almost didn't happen. I'm lucky to be here. Punched a hole in the ceiling pissing about with my pistol. It missed my head by millimetre's I swear I've got a chin burn. That would have looked good for the cops given all this other fog of ideas floating around because of my fiction. 'Murder suspect found dead presumed suicide'.
I logged onto my site. The forum is brimming. One of my fans has uploaded a scan of the local newspaper article about 'family massacre: killer at large'. Including interview with rotwieler. The good thing about the site is the user's can upload information about themselves. The bad thing about it is that only the complete arseholes bother to do that. Most of them lie and pretend to be some concept they have of themselves in cyber-land. The sensible ones remain anonymous "guest's" with the url computer console identity automagickally logged by the forum. That's bogus too, apparently my url is trackable to Nottingham which is just plain wrong anyway, so I assume they all are.
They're buzzing because the killer is copying my fiction. I say buzzing, its a three way conversation which is as busy as it ever gets in there. I say conversation, actually its more of an argument. Two lurkers logged in as guests. I switch off and get some sleep.
My phone wakes me up. Its my ex in hysterics. I can't make out a word she says through the sobbing. It dawns on me that her whole family have just been killed and she's probably going off her head about it. It takes an event like this for me to begin feeling sympathy for her.
"How did you get my number?" I ask when she pauses for breath. There really is no love lost between us, I assure you. I fiddle with the phone trying to find the record button because this is important and will possibly be used as police evidence at some time. I never got my head around this feature.
So instead I manage to play her my answerphone messages, including one from Rotwieler before he arrested me asking me to get back to him and a cryptic message from a vocoder voice that simply says "I did it". I manage to persuade the automatic answerphone system to play that back again and hastily scribble down the number that the call was made from, and the time and date.
Then I called rotweiler to tell him the news. I guess my ex has hanged up by then, thankfully. A passing thought that I might have to go to the funeral; in which case I'd have to see her face to face. She was always into gothic culture; black clothes and cemeteries and catholic symbolism. She'll probably enjoy herself there, center of attention to suit her drama queen bee in the bonnet persona.
"I need you to listen to the message left on my answerphone at blah o'clock... coincidentally while I was in police custody helping with enquiries... either someone with a vocoder or a robot has gotten hold of my number and left a message that says..." It occurs to me that leaving the phrase "I did it" on a cops answerphone, the same cop who very recently asked me on tape what I knew about a triple murder, is probably the dumbest thing I could do right now. "...something you need to hear." I hanged up on him too.
And then I went to bed with my pistol under my pillow. I practiced whipping it out a few times at lightning speed until I was sufficiently terrified that I might actually need to do this at some time, and suitably horrified how slow my reactions are, and then I fell asleep with it in my hand. How it had traveled half way across the room by itself by the time I woke up next morning remains a mystery.
What is it about this culture where it is normal not to get on with your ex partner? Like a memory of a fading photograph. I remember we had some amazing times and then she became a prime A bitch and it fell apart. Now we are caught up in a rut of hating each other with seething bitterness. Someone once told me it is repressed passion. Perhaps the massacre of her family will have opened her heart a little to the preciousness of Life and the value of true long term life friends.
She was sobbing and wiping her eyes when we met in the coffee shop we used to hang out in. Her mascara running down her face. She is so caught up in ritual behaviour that the twenty minute daily make-up job she does every morning is still important enough to her that she detached from reality to put on her mask, only to break down in public. She is so full of attention seeking drama that it's difficult for me to accept the face-value reality of her situation. She looks a lot better with mascara streaking down her cheeks.
I thought awkwardly about what to say. Apologizing seemed wrong; for one, she has never ever said the word sorry to me and for two, it's not my fault and I have done nothing wrong. Why do people apologize to the relatives of the deceased?
"I'm glad they're dead they were cunts." Honesty being the best policy where tactful politics required.
"Well if you're going to be like that you can leave!" Deadpan, repressing smirk. I knew she was faking. It is possible that we are on two different versions of reality and I'm being a shit-bag to her in her moment of despair. Frames of reference at cross purposes. I know her too well. The two versions exist in parallel; she plays one while hiding the other.
"You told me once you hate them and wish they were dead. Looks like your wish came true." See what I mean?
"You did it!" She shrieked. There's a humor in her tone, she loves the drama. Even over this. I know her well, thats how I can hear fine distinctions that a casual observer with the bias of a sympathetic gullability would easily miss, be taken in. I am aware that I am coming across as callous; please bare in mind that she turned me into this.
"No. I didn't." Very firmly stated.
"Liar!" She threw her coffee cup at me. I deflected it and watched with soggy sleeves as the staff asked her to leave. Her tantrum was legendary, I only hope they caught it on cctv. I finished my coffee and left behind a tense zone and shop staff who avoided my eyes.
CHAPTER SIX
The funeral was sombre. I kept my distance, receiving a nod from Rotweener. Her families social network was small, apparently; basically because they were such nasty people. So my ex led me to believe and I have no reason to doubt it from what they have done to me. She did look splendid in expensive goth style funeral clothes draped over the arm of one of her new boyfriends in a smart suit. They looked good together as a visual image, same style, long dark hair, book-ends. It was more like a social gathering for my ex and her various friends who turned up to support her and the stiff tension between them because none of them actually get on, largely because the common unifying factor, my ex, bitch-fests about her one mate to the other and then to the other about the first, ad infinitum. I left early before the grudge matches got out of hand.
My ex's ex-husband was also lurking in the background, in the car-park beneath the shadows of twisted trees, avoiding the cops. She has a son by him who called me daddy for two years. Neither of us are allowed to see the boy. Quote; "that's my decision as a mother" unquote. Generally considered irrational.
He was the chief witness to her parents alleged criminal damage to my vehicle, sabotaging the brakes and loosening the wheel nuts. They would show off to him about it afterwards, before we had told anybody about it. The only other possibility was he had done the damage himself to frame them. Because of circumstances that involves my ex, his ex-wife, in conspiracy with him. They both claim to loathe one another despite seeming happy to see each other on the occasions we have all coincidentally bumped into each other in passing or had some business together.
He texted me after the funeral, twice.
"hope all ok and you get to c our son because i dnt i only get photos and memories pass that on to that bitch yea"
"ps tell her that her new bf is being delt with"
I decided not to get involved and didn't reply. Didn't delete the messages either, it being evidence if the new boyfriend later turns up dead. Remember there's a gun with my prints on it knocking about someplace.
The more I turn it over in my mind, the more likely it seems that with my ex having convinced me that her parents are nutters, it was easy for me to believe that it was them who had sabotaged my car. The obvious staring me in the face. Her ex husband had done the car! Between them they had set her parents up. No doubt to get them off her case. So the story about the divorcees hating each other with bitter vengeance is a ruse? Or is it true? Or a mixture of both. Most likely. I have evidence here in my phone that he is jealous of his ex-wife's new boyfriends, which included me at one time. So he had a motive, and set them up as scapegoats. It's one possibility. But is he a murderer? Cutting my brakes was attempted manslaughter, not exactly the same level of depravity as premeditated murder.
Too much hatred here. My policy is and always has been to live and let live. I'm a socialist at heart. Dealing with so many bitter,nasty people is exhausting. Time for me to take a break.
CHAPTER SEVEN
"I'm knackered, I've been up late into the small hours again talking with a random sexy friend on the internet. I was writing my notes to wind down. It's been a while since I'd updated my website, due to life catching up with me. Thankfully the previous incidents seem to have blown over. 'Insufficient evidence to support further inquiry' is the police statement in the report. A whole house full of people have been brutally slaughtered, case closed. People I know."
"My friend was consoling me, not for the tragic loss of a local family of psycho's who most likely had it coming, if the tiny insight into their abusive nature I have experienced is an accurate portrayal of their general anti-social activities, but for the killer at large having framed me for it and very likely to strike again, with myself as the most probable victim - as well as my being prime suspect. Necessarily I have began my own investigation."
"Actually, tonight my friend was consoling me over the small matter that the hand gun I had acquired to protect myself has disappeared from my apartment while I was out buying coffee. Somebody has come in here, using a lockpick or a key, and removed it. Very worrying considering that it's covered in my fingerprints. That is why I am making this report, officer. My friend suggested I need police protection, and given that my fire-arm has gone missing with my prints on it, working with the police is probably the wisest thing I can do right now. If you won't let me stay in the cells overnight for my own good then I'll have no choice but to do something crazy to get myself arrested because right now I am frightened, exhausted and not thinking clearly."
Detective Lapdog paused the tape. The rest of it was a description of an illegal fire-arm for which the police refused to arrest me on the basis that I might be making the whole story up. If I had "come into the station waving a shooter about that would have been a different story!" Lapdog joked.
The police were very kind and let me stay in a cell until dawn. They even let me keep my notepad and biro. I usually make notes into my cellphone. Caught up in a police paradigm, cop zone, all the symbols change. That was the extent of 'police protection' so far as the likes of me are concerned. The desk clerk thoughtfully wished me luck as I left. I didn't stick around to hear what sort of luck. My belief is that we make our own luck.
Police cells are strange places. The word, cell. We use it for three things; a soulless place where prisoners wait, a humble place where monks meditate,an electrical battery power pack. Also phonetically it means to exchange goods for money. There must be some common linking factor. I wrote in my notepad; A cathartic feeling of emptiness left behind. Its the best I could muster.
CHAPTER EIGHT
You know, sometimes the best thing to do is just move on.
TBC...
I had explained repeatedly to the police that my writing is fictitious. Made up. Imaginary.
The police were having none of it.
"We know that you are using psychological intimidation." Shouted officer Rotweiler at me across the desk. I was momentarily confused because that was precisely a line from my story. The cop was grinning, obviously self-glorifying in his genius ability at being a total fuckwit.
I replied; "I returned home to find the lock on my front door had been tampered with. Some days later I discovered on my bookshelf a Ryan Inkling crime novel belonging to my ex-partner that I know for certain I had already returned to her with the rest of her stuff. It contained a bookmark on page 28 on which the story mentioned cars being sabotaged and people being killed. This came after the events where my car was sabotaged on two separate occasions and members of my ex's family allegedly confessed to it. I have no evidence of this but I did make reports to the police on both occasions. There are IRNs in the police computer database."
"What's an IRN?" Asked officer Lapdog, the 'good cop' called in by Rotwieler to help with the interview - which in my small experience of these matters is unorthodox, as they usually only have one cop do an interview. I suspect its to do with performance related pay.
"Incident Report Number." I replied.
"You sure seem to know a lot about policing." Mentioned Rotwieler.
"Are you on oath, constable?" I asked, genuinely. "And will you honour that oath throughout this meeting?"
Its something I have been trained to say but only now remembered. Had I done so when he picked me up I wouldn't be sitting in this interview room being harassed and intimidated by a guy who brushes the last millimetre of his number three nazi-cut with bleach to give him silver tipped spikes.
I could hear his mind grind to a halt in the shape of the word 'bastard'. Sparks from his clenched teeth or perhaps it was spittle arched across the room as he stared at me with such fierce intensity I thought his beady little eyes were about to fall out. I smiled and nodded toward the tape recorder quietly recording the interview.
To fill the heavy gap of silence that followed I helpfully added that "The novel is called 'A Hood Ganging'. I never liked Ryan Inkling myself. He gave my ex so many ideas about being a more successful criminal that she thought she could get away with anything."
"Are you intimating that your ex partner is involved?" Asked Lapdog. Rottwieler was still seething at me. He hadn't blinked yet and he was now drooling. I was wondering if the tape was picking up the snuffling sound of his rapid and perhaps rabid breathing. I was glad Lapdog was in the room.
"Of course she is involved!" I enthused. "I am not yet quite sure how. I am also not quite yet sure how it is that you believe I did these murders. Rotweiler said they happened this morning and yet I am quite clearly on cctv in town innocently doing my shopping. I knew nothing of it until he arrested me. Wrongful arrest I might add."
I dared to look at Rotweiler again. He finally broke his iron stare, glancing sideways as our eyes met. "The news still hasn't sunk in yet and I am trying to piece together exactly what has happened from the aggressive explainations I have been given here. You are telling me that my ex partners family have been found dead in exactly the same manner as I described in one of the 'short fiction about murder culture' stories recently published on my web blog. It sounds ludicrous. It also looks as if I have been set up. And it also smells like the cops are sniffing in the wrong circuits. Why are you reading my blogs anyway? How did that come to your attention in the first place? Whoever notified you that I am a crime thriller fiction writer on the internet needs investigating themselves, for a start."
"Don't tell me how to do my job!" Snarled Rotweiler.
So I didn't. I sat back and reminisced over the details. I had written the story in question through a haze of whisky and it is not my style to edit my work, nor read it again. So the specifics were not fresh in my mind. If its full of typo's and inacuracies and grammar mistakes then I trust my readers to point it out to me.
"Perhaps its one of my readers?" I suggested. "There's a forum on the website, I have a few ah, I guess you'd call them fans. Other writers. Oddballs. Depressed goths and lonely older women for the most part. Some of them are pretty fucked up, to be honest. Literary types who know what a struggle it is being a writer"
"It's you we are interested in." Rotweiler returned. "At face value I'd say we have an open and shut case. You told the world you planned a grotesque murder, then the murder happened exactly as you had described it."
"Apart from one significant detail: I didn't do it. I have been set up. Or you have a real freak out there who was inspired by my fiction."
"One who knows your family."
"I am at risk officer. I might be being stalked. The killer has already struck. As I have an alibi and am to be considered innocent, I request police protection."
Rotweiler actually laughed. Not a friendly laugh. I have never heard a jackal laugh, but I did hear a hyena on some nature documentary. The policemans laugh was something like that. For poetic depiction.
"So the murderer followed my story description exactly? Wow that's pretty serious!"
Lapdog produced a print out from my website and showed it to me.
"Hey that's copyright evasion that is!" I proclaimed. His unblinking stare was one of infinite patience. I gulped. He began to read aloud.
CHAPTER TWO
removed and rubber stamp marked CLASSIFIED in red ink
CHAPTER THREE
Officer Lapdog stopped reading.
"You have taken that out of context." I advised him.
The police officers said nothing. So I didn't either. Eventually they decided to let me go, on the basis that I had a watertight alibi; my request for the cctv camera tapes from town that day, which is likely to be enough to convince any judge that the cops are trying to set me up.
It was obvious to me that I didn't kill my ex partners family. It was obvious to everybody that somebody who had read my website, had done. Not exactly a copycat killing.
Of course I went straight around to their house to do some investigating of my own. An empty cop car parked opposite. I pulled my hoody up in case it contained a video camera. Figuring I had a right to be innocently knocking on the door and having been cleared as a suspect, I was brave enough to approach the door despite this.
There was no sign of police-tape securing the area like I have seen on tv. Budget cut-backs most probably. The door was ajar. After rigging the mains electric to the doorbell so as to activate the... Apparently it is uncanny how closely the murderer had followed my fictitious methodology. I went inside.
I have smelled death before. I knew a goth chick once who worked in a morgue, she smelled of formaldehyde more than dead bodies but even so, a sort of dryness, at the top of the mouth.
I first smelled death the day I found my grandfather dead in his favourite armchair when I was six years old. I didn't know it at the time of course, I thought he was just sleeping as I sat on his lap and watched tv with him for an hour before my mom got home and screamed the place down. This house stank of it.
I knew the bodies had already been removed from what the cops had told me. What they left behind gave me the creeps and the superstitious idea that I was breathing in corpses exhaling their last. Dead peoples air filling my lungs while I breathed in their space. Sickly yet not exactly accurate since it is emissions from the body that causes the strange smell, not air from the lungs.
If I was directing a textbook format horror movie, this is the moment where a series of scratchy black and white still images of some grotesquery would flash up and lurch at you as almost-subliminal imagery, while I look around the place. It's the first time I have been here truth be told. The house is immaculate, a show home, almost too tidy considering its recent history and how dirty the recently deceased residents are in their activities toward their fellow human beings. No dust on the mantelpiece. No smears on the mirrors. Not even a dog hair around the dog water bowl. Dog now also recently deceased, if the murderer has accurately stuck to the outline given on my website. It doesn't even smell of dog. As I said; deaths scent permeates.
Obviously the bodies had already been removed to a morgue. That it was so obviously a murder by the nature of the deaths provoked further investigation. Provocation being a concept to be highlighted here in several directions. In my story, the purpose for the massacre had been to draw attention to the fact the now deceased family had been getting away with a cruel intimidation campaign. Collectively for several years they had collaborated, victimising an innocent soul, a yoga teacher no less, beyond his breaking point. Pushing the poor sap beyond all reason and into an act of premeditated and psychotic retaliation and uncharacteristic violence.
It had been intended as a study of how people react under specific pressures, and how an ordinary Joe could be made into something he otherwise could never have been. Drawing the reader in through witness eyes, watching the campaign through the eyes of observers at each incident of psychological or emotional abuse. Seemingly unconnected incidents, driving the target increasingly toward paranoia, anger, and finally revenge.
I write crime fiction after I have argued with my ex. That's when the ideas form. She pushes buttons in me, she knows she is doing it, she does it on purpose to piss me off. Usually I roll my eyes and ignore her but some days... well nobody is perfect and some days she gets to me. We were an amazing couple despite her parents clandestine harassment campaign against us. Before she went over to their side and they threw out all the stops. Their disfunctional family need for a victim so as to unify their internal strife's found a perfect target in a man who practises pacifism and will not retaliate.
So I do base my stories events and characters on real life. Writing it down gets it out of my system. Perhaps its a cowards way out but I have much more to live for than acting on such thoughts as the ones she initiates. The pen is mightier than the sword, as they say. Probably from Samurai warrior school, the budo form of zen. Perhaps it was from Yukio Mishima.
Nobody has a house as clean as this, I found myself thinking as I explored upstairs. Its OCD on overdive.
CHAPTER FOUR
I bought a gun today. Took me a few weeks of searching the internet. No smoke without fire. Zippo click ting. Shoot the wings off the flies. Its an air pistol but sh! don't tell anyone. Its still lethal at close quarters. I'm going out to the woods tomorrow to do some target practise.
The gun is silent. Ok so not silent, it makes noise but after watching so much crap hollywood drama with reverb laden special sound effects its a surprise how quiet my new best friend is. In a normal days hustle and bustle in town I am pretty sure nobody would even notice if I discreetly let it off in the high street. Except cctv, that would be a problem. I'll have to get an umbrella.
I got it purely for self defence purposes. I'm beginning to feel like a character in one of my own books. Fiction is usually a heightened version of reality. Everyone is cooler or nastier or whatever. More exaggurated compared to people in real life. Otherwise there'd be no substantial story.
Crow. My name's Crow. It was my fathers name before me and his fathers before him. Technically that three generations is a flock of Crows which of course is a perfect ideology since the specific collective name for Crows is a Murder. Story of my life. I just never thought that all the life I put into my work would turn around and that the stories would start putting their deaths into my life.
I missed my target four times out of five by the way. More target practise tomorrow. The woods is great on a dry day. Fresh air and nature sounds. Refreshing. Exactly what I need. Less dense population so there's more head space for me to expand my senses and chill. Outdoors is good for that. I think I was going stir crazy spending too much time indoors.
Its got me thinking cleanly. I could be anybody I want to be in a story book, living any life I choose. Why not the same in real life? I'm going charity shop browsing tomorrow to see if I can pick up a trenchcoat. The sense of theatrical might add some fun back into my life. A sense of adventure.
"We don't know how far the ripples of our decisions go. You kill one, and maybe save a thousand. That's the code of the Fraternity. That's what we believe in. And that's why we do it."
-Fox, Wanted, universal pictures.
And here I sit, my back to the window, waiting for the bullet to speckle my craptop screen with adrenaline and grade 4 caffeine flavoured moolah. Watching movies about machismo that cost a quid for five in the charity store. My pistol in my lap. Wondering how to make dry ice bullets that leave no nasty let's call them after-stains. Coins as bullets. My names come up on the loom of fate. Left it too late. Feathers of justice.
Last time I went out to a club the bouncers and barstaff and half the clientele had been tipped off by my ex and her hate crews spite crusade that I am some kind of sick fucker, and nobody would speak with me all night. Discreditation campaign took me out. Took my life apart.
Zen has always been the answer. The ones who sucker for her lies are idiots I'm better off without. If that's 99% of everyone then its easier now for me to see who the real people are, the ones on my wavelength, the ones with hearts that do the thinking. It gets lonely though. I'm lonely. The local women know me by a false reputation and won't give me the time of day much less go on a date with me. There's only so much slow, deep, meditation breathing a person can do in a cultural background as stressful as the post post-modern west.
So, now you know Me. The movies boring. So who am I am now? The guy who gets plagiarised off facebook before account deleted and I disappear from your view?
CHAPTER FIVE
This time around there's a chapter five. It almost didn't happen. I'm lucky to be here. Punched a hole in the ceiling pissing about with my pistol. It missed my head by millimetre's I swear I've got a chin burn. That would have looked good for the cops given all this other fog of ideas floating around because of my fiction. 'Murder suspect found dead presumed suicide'.
I logged onto my site. The forum is brimming. One of my fans has uploaded a scan of the local newspaper article about 'family massacre: killer at large'. Including interview with rotwieler. The good thing about the site is the user's can upload information about themselves. The bad thing about it is that only the complete arseholes bother to do that. Most of them lie and pretend to be some concept they have of themselves in cyber-land. The sensible ones remain anonymous "guest's" with the url computer console identity automagickally logged by the forum. That's bogus too, apparently my url is trackable to Nottingham which is just plain wrong anyway, so I assume they all are.
They're buzzing because the killer is copying my fiction. I say buzzing, its a three way conversation which is as busy as it ever gets in there. I say conversation, actually its more of an argument. Two lurkers logged in as guests. I switch off and get some sleep.
My phone wakes me up. Its my ex in hysterics. I can't make out a word she says through the sobbing. It dawns on me that her whole family have just been killed and she's probably going off her head about it. It takes an event like this for me to begin feeling sympathy for her.
"How did you get my number?" I ask when she pauses for breath. There really is no love lost between us, I assure you. I fiddle with the phone trying to find the record button because this is important and will possibly be used as police evidence at some time. I never got my head around this feature.
So instead I manage to play her my answerphone messages, including one from Rotwieler before he arrested me asking me to get back to him and a cryptic message from a vocoder voice that simply says "I did it". I manage to persuade the automatic answerphone system to play that back again and hastily scribble down the number that the call was made from, and the time and date.
Then I called rotweiler to tell him the news. I guess my ex has hanged up by then, thankfully. A passing thought that I might have to go to the funeral; in which case I'd have to see her face to face. She was always into gothic culture; black clothes and cemeteries and catholic symbolism. She'll probably enjoy herself there, center of attention to suit her drama queen bee in the bonnet persona.
"I need you to listen to the message left on my answerphone at blah o'clock... coincidentally while I was in police custody helping with enquiries... either someone with a vocoder or a robot has gotten hold of my number and left a message that says..." It occurs to me that leaving the phrase "I did it" on a cops answerphone, the same cop who very recently asked me on tape what I knew about a triple murder, is probably the dumbest thing I could do right now. "...something you need to hear." I hanged up on him too.
And then I went to bed with my pistol under my pillow. I practiced whipping it out a few times at lightning speed until I was sufficiently terrified that I might actually need to do this at some time, and suitably horrified how slow my reactions are, and then I fell asleep with it in my hand. How it had traveled half way across the room by itself by the time I woke up next morning remains a mystery.
What is it about this culture where it is normal not to get on with your ex partner? Like a memory of a fading photograph. I remember we had some amazing times and then she became a prime A bitch and it fell apart. Now we are caught up in a rut of hating each other with seething bitterness. Someone once told me it is repressed passion. Perhaps the massacre of her family will have opened her heart a little to the preciousness of Life and the value of true long term life friends.
She was sobbing and wiping her eyes when we met in the coffee shop we used to hang out in. Her mascara running down her face. She is so caught up in ritual behaviour that the twenty minute daily make-up job she does every morning is still important enough to her that she detached from reality to put on her mask, only to break down in public. She is so full of attention seeking drama that it's difficult for me to accept the face-value reality of her situation. She looks a lot better with mascara streaking down her cheeks.
I thought awkwardly about what to say. Apologizing seemed wrong; for one, she has never ever said the word sorry to me and for two, it's not my fault and I have done nothing wrong. Why do people apologize to the relatives of the deceased?
"I'm glad they're dead they were cunts." Honesty being the best policy where tactful politics required.
"Well if you're going to be like that you can leave!" Deadpan, repressing smirk. I knew she was faking. It is possible that we are on two different versions of reality and I'm being a shit-bag to her in her moment of despair. Frames of reference at cross purposes. I know her too well. The two versions exist in parallel; she plays one while hiding the other.
"You told me once you hate them and wish they were dead. Looks like your wish came true." See what I mean?
"You did it!" She shrieked. There's a humor in her tone, she loves the drama. Even over this. I know her well, thats how I can hear fine distinctions that a casual observer with the bias of a sympathetic gullability would easily miss, be taken in. I am aware that I am coming across as callous; please bare in mind that she turned me into this.
"No. I didn't." Very firmly stated.
"Liar!" She threw her coffee cup at me. I deflected it and watched with soggy sleeves as the staff asked her to leave. Her tantrum was legendary, I only hope they caught it on cctv. I finished my coffee and left behind a tense zone and shop staff who avoided my eyes.
CHAPTER SIX
The funeral was sombre. I kept my distance, receiving a nod from Rotweener. Her families social network was small, apparently; basically because they were such nasty people. So my ex led me to believe and I have no reason to doubt it from what they have done to me. She did look splendid in expensive goth style funeral clothes draped over the arm of one of her new boyfriends in a smart suit. They looked good together as a visual image, same style, long dark hair, book-ends. It was more like a social gathering for my ex and her various friends who turned up to support her and the stiff tension between them because none of them actually get on, largely because the common unifying factor, my ex, bitch-fests about her one mate to the other and then to the other about the first, ad infinitum. I left early before the grudge matches got out of hand.
My ex's ex-husband was also lurking in the background, in the car-park beneath the shadows of twisted trees, avoiding the cops. She has a son by him who called me daddy for two years. Neither of us are allowed to see the boy. Quote; "that's my decision as a mother" unquote. Generally considered irrational.
He was the chief witness to her parents alleged criminal damage to my vehicle, sabotaging the brakes and loosening the wheel nuts. They would show off to him about it afterwards, before we had told anybody about it. The only other possibility was he had done the damage himself to frame them. Because of circumstances that involves my ex, his ex-wife, in conspiracy with him. They both claim to loathe one another despite seeming happy to see each other on the occasions we have all coincidentally bumped into each other in passing or had some business together.
He texted me after the funeral, twice.
"hope all ok and you get to c our son because i dnt i only get photos and memories pass that on to that bitch yea"
"ps tell her that her new bf is being delt with"
I decided not to get involved and didn't reply. Didn't delete the messages either, it being evidence if the new boyfriend later turns up dead. Remember there's a gun with my prints on it knocking about someplace.
The more I turn it over in my mind, the more likely it seems that with my ex having convinced me that her parents are nutters, it was easy for me to believe that it was them who had sabotaged my car. The obvious staring me in the face. Her ex husband had done the car! Between them they had set her parents up. No doubt to get them off her case. So the story about the divorcees hating each other with bitter vengeance is a ruse? Or is it true? Or a mixture of both. Most likely. I have evidence here in my phone that he is jealous of his ex-wife's new boyfriends, which included me at one time. So he had a motive, and set them up as scapegoats. It's one possibility. But is he a murderer? Cutting my brakes was attempted manslaughter, not exactly the same level of depravity as premeditated murder.
Too much hatred here. My policy is and always has been to live and let live. I'm a socialist at heart. Dealing with so many bitter,nasty people is exhausting. Time for me to take a break.
CHAPTER SEVEN
"I'm knackered, I've been up late into the small hours again talking with a random sexy friend on the internet. I was writing my notes to wind down. It's been a while since I'd updated my website, due to life catching up with me. Thankfully the previous incidents seem to have blown over. 'Insufficient evidence to support further inquiry' is the police statement in the report. A whole house full of people have been brutally slaughtered, case closed. People I know."
"My friend was consoling me, not for the tragic loss of a local family of psycho's who most likely had it coming, if the tiny insight into their abusive nature I have experienced is an accurate portrayal of their general anti-social activities, but for the killer at large having framed me for it and very likely to strike again, with myself as the most probable victim - as well as my being prime suspect. Necessarily I have began my own investigation."
"Actually, tonight my friend was consoling me over the small matter that the hand gun I had acquired to protect myself has disappeared from my apartment while I was out buying coffee. Somebody has come in here, using a lockpick or a key, and removed it. Very worrying considering that it's covered in my fingerprints. That is why I am making this report, officer. My friend suggested I need police protection, and given that my fire-arm has gone missing with my prints on it, working with the police is probably the wisest thing I can do right now. If you won't let me stay in the cells overnight for my own good then I'll have no choice but to do something crazy to get myself arrested because right now I am frightened, exhausted and not thinking clearly."
Detective Lapdog paused the tape. The rest of it was a description of an illegal fire-arm for which the police refused to arrest me on the basis that I might be making the whole story up. If I had "come into the station waving a shooter about that would have been a different story!" Lapdog joked.
The police were very kind and let me stay in a cell until dawn. They even let me keep my notepad and biro. I usually make notes into my cellphone. Caught up in a police paradigm, cop zone, all the symbols change. That was the extent of 'police protection' so far as the likes of me are concerned. The desk clerk thoughtfully wished me luck as I left. I didn't stick around to hear what sort of luck. My belief is that we make our own luck.
Police cells are strange places. The word, cell. We use it for three things; a soulless place where prisoners wait, a humble place where monks meditate,an electrical battery power pack. Also phonetically it means to exchange goods for money. There must be some common linking factor. I wrote in my notepad; A cathartic feeling of emptiness left behind. Its the best I could muster.
CHAPTER EIGHT
You know, sometimes the best thing to do is just move on.
TBC...
Book 3: MURDER SIGNS
CHAPTER ONE
'The window will open. There are others like you. Isolated. Alone. Nowhere to go. The window will open soon. When it does... jump ship.'
'They are spirits. Bad ones. They make us do this. Making us be like this. Control us from the spirit world. They feed thoughts into our heads and we act on it. Nearly everyone is affected but only a few can see it.'
'The courts can't do anything about it. The pharmacy funded mental health paradigm denies it is real. Their doctrine books call it paranoid schizophrenia.'
'Spiritualism is the state religion of China. It translates as Ancestor Worship. All cultures have a heritage of communion with ghosts, usually relatives. It is mainstream human culture throughout all of recorded history, except christian-science cults. A great big hole in the logic of post Catholic Age of Reason. The minority are in denial for reasons of maintaining a delusion of control and authority.'
'Writing it down clears it out of my head. I have to trap the words on the paper. Trap the thoughts there. That way it can't travel through me. It's stuck in the words. But it finds a way. It whispers. Then I have to write it all again. It's telling me. It tells me what to do and what words to say. Its words spoken through me. Strange words like a foreign language. Gibberish with meaning. It is in the thoughts.'
'It can taste that you're there, bud. Says things like that to me all the time. All the time.'
'It's different people talking. I know that now. Using me to say their garbled message. It's killing my mind. They say it will be easier when I stop struggling.'
'Do not read the words. It enters through.'
He had scribbled the notes on the backs of playing cards he had picked up in the street.
One of the notes described how he found playing cards everywhere he went. He described how it was like living in the Tarot or Alice in Wonderland. Some force or energy was placing all the lost cards of the cities ten thousand broken decks on his route. Always the same cards. That's what was so unnerving.
Detective Growler filed the information in Detective Growler's meticulous mind. He was paid to perform this specific task and he was good at it. He held the bundle, wrapped together with elastic bands of the same brand dropped all over the city by its inumerous postmen on a daily basis. Growler flicked through the assortment of wild writing. It was the nearest thing they had to a suicide note. The vagrant was obviously a suicide, no two ways about it. Half drunk on a half drunk bottle of cheap spirits, and an expensive cache of empty paracetamol foils.
'This is a headache.' Thinks Detective Growler.
The bum had been clutching the bundle of notes to his chest with both hands when he passed. Growler had pried them loose. One of the cards in particular caught his eye.
'They're after me. They'll find you too once you burn the sigil to your mind. They want me on their side. Of the line. It's Nearing time.'
The note had a strange symbol on it, repeated larger on the next card. Several of the cards had similar marks, all different. Some also had a single word, example; 'protect', next to the designs. They had all been written in cheap black biro.
'The name of the daemon is BAN. It chases. It chooses those of us with marked souls. It means business.'
CHAPTER TWO
I spent that night in a police cell. Not that I had done anything; I hadn't even been arrested. I'd requested it. A mass murderer was toying with me and the cells seemed the safest retreat.
My name is Crow and I'm on the run. I previously ran a popular website called Murder Fiction. I'm a writer. My writing got me in trouble with the cops. Someone is doing copycat killings based on the fiction that is based on my life. I'm a prime suspect. I believe I'm the next target.
I wrote the following notes in the timeless quiet of a concrete box, behind bars. It's the most relaxed I had been for a long while. I felt protected. It helped me clear my head and focus on what I should be doing.
Cell Notes
She carved into her chest 'please don't leave me' and sent him a photo. She had video's of herself doing it but the technology wouldn't let her mms the scene to him. By the time he read his text messages she had given up and slashed her wrists.
Desperation for attention become psychosis because she's driven herself mad with thoughts she can't let go of.
He had only been there half an hour before the estimated time of death (ETA). A neighbor had heard them arguing, door slam, he left. Trouble being that the neighbor said the door slammed half an hour after the raised voices had stopped. He was very sure of it. I looked into it. Paranormal Investigator Team had beat me to it; they'd seen it coming.
The blood soaked sheets were expensive, he'd bought them as a gift on the internet, imported Chinese silk, black of course.
We knew he'd done it but there was nothing we could do to pin it on him without confession. The blade, the athame that the couple had used for their rituals, had both their prints on, and bodily fluids. It went missing from the police safe. Somebody is a collector.
Into heavy stuff they were, gothic voodoo cult. Blood rites for the sex gods, thanateros, all the usual necromancy and spirit worship. The cctv camera had picked up on some of it, suxubi sex spirits coming and going back and forth to her apartment. The court service can't deal with the half of it. Simple murder inquiry would have raised too many issues. The cities coven involve high level prestigious social positions that do not get incriminated. Easier to write her off as a suicide. Face value. Who gives a shit anyway? Beatniks or gothics or whatever they call them nowadays. Once they go down that path...
Images flash and I watch scenes in lucid black and white, like as though I'm watching it on tv of an old movie. Depthless two-dimensional characters in a cheap budget wooden character acting. Characters hardly brought to life.
...they are already dead.
I write to empty my head of all the imagery and feelings. It is an emotional download really more than anything, the story is consequence of that journey. I can't rest until I feel empty of it. Like clearing out the cobwebs so its clean and the air can flow. Then I can sleep. My mind whirs with tension most of the time. Writing is relaxing. I'm driven to do it, it beats pacing up and down or rocking with my arms hugging my knees. I was asked on the website where I get my ideas from. Most of it is from my own life. Occasionally I fantasy, working with some new theme that isn't one I have to deal with in the immediacy of my normal day. That's the form of escapism I enjoy the most.
I have been writing for long enough to question where the fiction ideas come from. I have been writing for long enough to wonder why I write about things that then feature in the symbol of my day to day attention. Is it that I call them into being, draw upon them by going into imagination? Or is imagination a way of seeing in advance the themes that are on their way toward me as experiences? It scares the shit out of me when I keep coming back to certain specific topics. A lot of it comes through in abstract form, but when you have made the connection with writing done in advance, and an event that follows... I'm sure you'll see what I mean. Keep reading.
CHAPTER THREE
"Where do the words come from? The stories? What's the source? You say its real life but some of them are obviously fiction." Asks Lillith777 on my Murder Fiction website forum, late one night.
"Less than you'd think." I reply in satire and tiredness.
"How do the words form?" She is persistent. There's a glow about her, I can feel her attention on me like a breeze. It's amber.
"They form in my mind and I am compelled to write them down." I reply honestly.
"Like spirit possession?" She asks.
"Perhaps. It's funny you mention it. I started work on a new story yesterday that involves that very same thing."
"BAN" she replies.
I crap my pants. "What the fuck?"
"It's what I call my guardian protector spirit. Beats All Negativity. Big And Nasty. Bee Ay En. BAN. It bashes up anything evil from the spirit plane that tries to get to me. Also the word means to banish. So I typed it just now to protect me from anything bad that might come to me through speaking with you. You're nuts, to be writing all this dark shit. You are invoking a lot of negative energies. Your website is full of it. I bet you can't deal with the half of it."
"I gather that you are into witchcraft?" I ask.
"I'm a priestess." She explains, simply.
"Then you should already know about the realm of creativity where idea's take form and we plug into them by using our minds like a radio."
"I do that all the time. It's why I asked you. I'm clairvoyant."
We met because she is into my fiction enough to get a train the next day and she can afford a ticket. A classy goth chick with eyes that see through to a higher order. Arrogant and mad. But attractive and into sex in a way I had never dreamed of. She brought us a coffee in my regular cafe and we talked about ghosts.
Gradually I began to realise she's a missionary dedicated to fucking vulnerable men's heads up with her wicca nonsense. Or to put it her way, she see's a black cloud around me that frightens her so she's here to exorcise it. And to get laid as payment. Before and after the exorcism. During. She was vague about the specifics prior to the act. Apparently my excessively base spectrum prana is strength for her and her spirit allies. She can heal me and use my life force at the same time. It suits me fine!
She see's aura's and has crystals dangling from around her neck. Her eyes behind sunglasses are dark and beautiful. She has classic cleopatra hairstyle and layers of expensive light black drapes and silver ornaments. I fell in love with her image as much as she had. Beyond that and her spooky mental world, she's a skinny white vegan rich bitch with a pet cat, black of course, and a sexual appetite that enslaved me to her bidding too fucking easily. Strong willed and smelling of a home made rare herbal tincture that does odd things to the mind. She works for some clandestine paranormal research group with private funds, called PIT. "Ask no questions beg no lies."
Lilly stayed the weekend and introduced me to her powers. We held a seance and she proved beyond doubt that there's something to it all. Then she exorcised the fucker who has been putting such dark thoughts in my mind. She says there's a much better outlet for my creative energies than Murder Fiction. She advised me to pray to the Archon Azathoth for healing, and to use sea salt in my bath and visualise white light surrounding me all the time. Said she'd return with some spirit mushrooms if I was a good boy. I can't work out her age and she wouldn't tell me. Sixteen to forty. An overly experienced mature woman in a teenage childs body. Gentle as the kiss of sunlight and strong as the steel in her ice-velvet gaze. Her hands are delicate and frail, she's elfin and soft. And she kisses like an angel. She makes me feel like one.
CHAPTER FOUR
'You're either a pro or a con' -cop joke.
Rottweiler was flaking dry skank from the girls knickers to snort like cocaine. Its his own secret personal habit, the most excitement he ever gets beyond traumatizing arrest victims. He knows it's psychotic but his policing methods are so effective that his superiors turn a blind eye. The force is like that, in this city at least. The girl in question is anonymous, some superior-scented musky goth chick most likely, judging by Crow's preferred type and the type of underwear she prefers. She'd incidentally left her lacy black panties behind before number one murder suspect Crow had disappeared two weeks ago.
Officer Rottweiler was not investigating the apartment in the line of duty. He was planting evidence to be discovered at a later time by the forensics team, had been side-tracked by an important discovery, currently being softly fingered by his sensitive fingertips in his overcoat pocket.
CHAPTER FIVE
We went to stay at hers for a while. For me it was a much needed break and for her it was nice to have a guy around. We honeymooned and she took time off work.
She explained; "My department specialize in working with psychotics. Those tortured souls whose perceptions are more likely to cross over into supernature enough that we can collate gathered information. What I do involves where that connects with criminal activities. Therefore we have also a lot of police involvement. Psychic development is nothing new to humanity although with fluoridated water and chemicals in food, most people seldom develop it much beyond the general baseline spectrum of disbelief and wishful thinking, or fantasy movies. We all emit psychic fields, waveforms peculiar to our manifestations. Therefore sensitives such as my team are able to detect a lot of useful information. Occasionally we are hired by military as trainers, however they have their own equivalent to our outfit and my lot would not easily cope with the insensitive nature of military purpose. Most of the team have mundane lives, normal everyday jobs, and are called on for their talents. We meet regularly and because of a common interest in paranormal, most of them are pagans; one or two devout religious be it wicca or christianity. We have something of a reputation as a coven or secret society. our preference for using memory instead of written records, a clandestine existence serves our purpose better than were we a commercial ghostbusters. Too much psychic attention from too many observers clouds up whatever we are pursuing, it is a factor in how these things work. So we remain off the record, yet funded through various channels."
"I didn't know this sort of thing exists outside of fiction." I replied.
"Oh, it doesn't." She smiled innocently. I love this woman.
Later, she went into mode. It was a little eery, one moment she was solid and stable and the next she was light as a butterfly, made of air as if solid objects could pass through her. Her whole body language changed.
"What is it?" I asked concerned. She half sneered at me to tell me to shut up, not distract her. She seemed to be listening for something, angling her head strangely, listening with her temples instead of her ears.
"There is, someone... making a film of us. They are getting it right." She seemed very relieved at this. "They are watching, watching through us. Like a ghost, a spirit. Particles reacting to their observation and we, our minds, are those particles. Future people, to be so high, it must be. Our lives swayed by the future." Her voice had gone doolally, rising and falling as if she was mad. "The film is a needle in the groove of the malleable nature of our existence. The future is higher pitched than we are, a faster vibration that cuts deeper into our creative now than the sum total energy we collectively muster as a group, as a story, as a current, electrical, energy flow. Our Ka. This is the process of myth being made."
She seemed to snap out of it and looked directly at me. "Our trouble is that we are affected by so many observers, too many. Once spellbound by movie power of stemming off disbelief, the viewers preconceptions and guesswork floods in and makes threads of possibility, which by cause and affect steer our path."
She slumped forward and I caught her. She was drained, her flesh had gone gray. I held her until she was strong enough to stand on her feet and sit down by herself. I fetched her some water. "Does this happen often?"
"When it is meant to." It was difficult for her to talk. She had gone from fairy light to heavy clay but the colour was returning to her cheeks. She looked beautiful. We kissed gently. "I'm glad you are here. Did I say anything? Interesting?"
CHAPTER SIX
So we went to see Lilly's friends band. After the gig the singer explained; "I use internet a lot also, the live forums. Its fun because you can wind your fans up. This one guy, he’s on my mailing list, attends all my online gigs. I always boot him just before playing one particular song, knowing he will log in again. He has begun to suss. The lyrics are about being booted by your favorite thing and how it turns you obsessive. Then when he shows up at the live gigs expecting special treatment form a star because of this, I accuse him of playing mind games and of being a psychopath, stalking someone famous, its easy for the cops to believe. Power, exercised this way. I get a kick from it.”
My mind came to the conclusion; she’s a bitch. People in the room nodded, laughed, agreed, sucking up to her ego. My eyes caught my lovers and she smirked at me, difficult to read if she was supporting or dismissing. She rolled her eyes; dismissing.
“Making guys feel like losers. Love it.” Adds some neo-feminist fan from the room.
“You know, behaving that way can get you in trouble.” I took her on.
All the rooms attentions hanging on the silence.
“Nah.” She retorted, cackling, sneering, derisive. Her voice is that of a cracked angel, its easy to see why she is an increasingly famous singer with diva reputation. I should probably be feeling grateful to have someone so precious grace my life momentarily; truth is I wrote her off at that moment as a pretentious abusive who has it coming. Two weeks later the headlines of online music journals bulletined that she narrowly survived a rape attempt in a backstage alley. Self manifested destiny, a karmic reward from the universe, the ultimate player in a game where strategies for success have their own channels. Marketing ploy. We got the low-down from real life, being connected can be interesting. Shadow never even grabbed her much less drew blood, there we were imagining imagery of helpless femme (who in real life happens to be kick boxer in training gym addict) pinned up against a wall by butch thug on steroids. A week later, her music video released directly to youtube; bdsm culture inspired, heels on scrotum, white teeth red lips black shiny plastic wrapped feminine form gang stalking terrified little manling into submission. These are not nice people, then again they don’t claim to be. They only accepted me because knowing murder writers on the run from both killers and the police is a social kudos chip in their stupid ego persona identity games. Their music rocks though if you’re into that sort of thing.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I returned to the city.
It was obvious my flat had been searched; I had set the usual booby traps of sticky tape on the door, a webcam hidden in the kitchen duct fan with the chip from a pager, do you remember those? It was before mobile phones became ubiquitous. My mate at the electrical repair store in the market builds stuff like that, he’s a genius at it, officially he recycles computers for a living. The pager connects to my computer and runs a live stream as soon as the motion sensor from a garden light activates it and live streams it to a server. I downloaded the file, there were only three recordings and two of those were myself coming and going. It was very obviously officer Rottweiler, the camera even caught his badge number. I posted it up to the Murder Tales forum to stir things up a bit. He’s sick in the head. The recording proves it.
Then I sat down and began assorting the pile of bills which had arrived through the mail while I was away. I was interrupted by the doorbell. Craning my neck to peer out of the window down to the front door below I saw a man walking away. I recognised him immediately, he is one of the jerks who was following me about previously. Quick memory flash; he was at the funeral, he was in the coffee shop when I met up with my ex a few times also. It was his behavior that struck me as odd; he never actually drank his coffee he sat there and pretended to drink it while trying not to be eavesdropping on our conversation and fiddling with something on his lap, I assumed it to be a recording device, a cellphone probably. One time I confronted him in the street outside my house, asked him why he was following me around. He called me paranoid and walked briskly away. Incidental incidents, now become relevant. Coming into focus. I assume him to be plains clothes. He is recognizable, has pit-marks on his face and always wears the same clothes; black but far from gothic.
I had to go into town for some supplies and walked past an undercover leaning in the bus stop outside my place. Their clothes are faded as if having been washed too many times, jeans and baseball caps, cheap brand sports tops and trainers. As I walked past I heard him speak into his phone; “Yeah he’s walking past me right now on his way into town, his usual route.” For a moment I considered pressing him up against the bus stop and warning him to stop following me; fear an anger are natural responses when faced with this sort of pressure situation. This type are not your regular cops, I imagine they are criminals on day release, working unofficially as deputies for some sheriff in exchange for a reduced sentence. The physical build of burglars, not combat trained six foot five tall beefcakes in the standard policy enforcer uniform.
Stalking is a statutory criminal offense but proving it is damn difficult especially when it is undercover cops who are doing it in name of criminal investigations. I know for a fact that I am not a criminal. In one early Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde inspired murder tale I had been contemplating the concept of false memory syndromes and multiple personality disorder. I am damn sure that does not apply to me though. The idea that any normal person could be unaware of their own activities half of the time, or even occasionally, applies to any of us. It is normal to forget things occasionally, like where did I leave the damn house keys, did I remember to close the fridge, turn the bathroom light off, that level of memory lapse. Not at all the same as being oblivious to having gone out and killed a bunch of people.
In town I decided to sit in the coffee shop and text my girlfriend, she would be wondering how things are going. Sure enough, the man in black entered and sat down on the table next to me. I moved and sat directly opposite him. To my left, the door to the coffeeshop. The counter behind him, walls and tables behind us both and to my right.
“It is about time you and I caught up on a few things.” I said confidently. He stared at me.
After a moment he took a deep breath, sighed, and looked me directly in the eye.
“Been out of town.” he stated. I already knew that, it was an ice-breaker of sorts. At least he was prepared to speak with me now.
“There’s a lot going on.” I replied candidly. I maintained the eye contact as i took a sip from my coffee. He broke the gaze first. My win. Very grateful to Lilly’s cats for teaching me how to not blink.
“I’m going to lay the cards on the table.” He said. He looked around furtively to see if anyone was watching. Nobody was. I continued watching him. “I want you on my crew.”
“Not interested.”
“I need your mind. We know you are smart, more than the rest of my crew and possibly more than myself.”
“Will your crew stop following me around if I accept?”
“No, we have boxes to tick but they won’t cause you any trouble. Regard them as security.” I should have asked 'for who?'.
"This cloak and dagger stuff…” I let my voice trail off to make my point about it. “What would it involve?” I asked after he ignored my comment. “I have no interest in stalking people." I added; "Or being followed.”
“I need a calculator. To feed with information that does not seem to add up and to make sense of it. I read your writing and you think in that way.”
“Why did you not simply ask me this a year ago when you and your crew first began your little operation?”
“You’re green. You were an idiot. It is on the job training in this line of work and we had to sharpen you up. Alerting my superiors to your website was to get you in the loop.”
“So you are a cop?”
“Officially; rehabilitation.” He meant offenders. My theory proved right.
It all clicked together. “Whats in it for me?”
His phone bleeped. He looked at it and stood up. “I’m giving you leverage. Be useful and we'll see.” He turned and walked away. He still had not drank any of his coffee.
I sent the audio file of the meeting directly to Lilly’s email address through my new unregistered cellphone. Marvels of modern technology; a decade ago this would have been impossible, it would have required a dictaphone to make any such recording.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Back in the flat I decided to start an entirely new story to take my mind off things. A new approach. I sat down at the keyboard and I wrote for three solid hours, a complete short story full of sidetracked issues and red herrings entitled Dead End. Basic film noir symbology to tie it altogether. Sometimes the cliche’s are there for a reason and after taking some time out lately my fans deserved something to keep them happy. Back to the flat, back to the routine, the same old habitual behavioral patterns as always. It was late by the time I went to bed and I still couldn’t sleep. I read the positive energy text messages that Lilly had sent me and thought back through the last week. Began to realize how much I am missing her already.
I still had not figured out what to do with the mini-crowbar I had discovered hidden in my toilet cistern. I had left it there for now, not at all interested in touching the thing. It would have to be disposed of in some way, quickly too. I figured that if I was seen acting suspiciously with it, for example going out to throw it in the river at this time of night, was only likely to get me into trouble. The more I thought about Rottweiler the more I realized that he is psychotic to be behaving that way. Perhaps his department genuinely believe me to be guilty but they have no evidence so they are setting me up. What little I know about real police methods compared with the fiction of television. A crowbar, my name being Crow, bars on windows; psychological intimidation underlined and triple-x rated.
I slept and woke late.
To Be Continued....
(some already written, to copytype from cellphone)
...when i get time to do it
'The window will open. There are others like you. Isolated. Alone. Nowhere to go. The window will open soon. When it does... jump ship.'
'They are spirits. Bad ones. They make us do this. Making us be like this. Control us from the spirit world. They feed thoughts into our heads and we act on it. Nearly everyone is affected but only a few can see it.'
'The courts can't do anything about it. The pharmacy funded mental health paradigm denies it is real. Their doctrine books call it paranoid schizophrenia.'
'Spiritualism is the state religion of China. It translates as Ancestor Worship. All cultures have a heritage of communion with ghosts, usually relatives. It is mainstream human culture throughout all of recorded history, except christian-science cults. A great big hole in the logic of post Catholic Age of Reason. The minority are in denial for reasons of maintaining a delusion of control and authority.'
'Writing it down clears it out of my head. I have to trap the words on the paper. Trap the thoughts there. That way it can't travel through me. It's stuck in the words. But it finds a way. It whispers. Then I have to write it all again. It's telling me. It tells me what to do and what words to say. Its words spoken through me. Strange words like a foreign language. Gibberish with meaning. It is in the thoughts.'
'It can taste that you're there, bud. Says things like that to me all the time. All the time.'
'It's different people talking. I know that now. Using me to say their garbled message. It's killing my mind. They say it will be easier when I stop struggling.'
'Do not read the words. It enters through.'
He had scribbled the notes on the backs of playing cards he had picked up in the street.
One of the notes described how he found playing cards everywhere he went. He described how it was like living in the Tarot or Alice in Wonderland. Some force or energy was placing all the lost cards of the cities ten thousand broken decks on his route. Always the same cards. That's what was so unnerving.
Detective Growler filed the information in Detective Growler's meticulous mind. He was paid to perform this specific task and he was good at it. He held the bundle, wrapped together with elastic bands of the same brand dropped all over the city by its inumerous postmen on a daily basis. Growler flicked through the assortment of wild writing. It was the nearest thing they had to a suicide note. The vagrant was obviously a suicide, no two ways about it. Half drunk on a half drunk bottle of cheap spirits, and an expensive cache of empty paracetamol foils.
'This is a headache.' Thinks Detective Growler.
The bum had been clutching the bundle of notes to his chest with both hands when he passed. Growler had pried them loose. One of the cards in particular caught his eye.
'They're after me. They'll find you too once you burn the sigil to your mind. They want me on their side. Of the line. It's Nearing time.'
The note had a strange symbol on it, repeated larger on the next card. Several of the cards had similar marks, all different. Some also had a single word, example; 'protect', next to the designs. They had all been written in cheap black biro.
'The name of the daemon is BAN. It chases. It chooses those of us with marked souls. It means business.'
CHAPTER TWO
I spent that night in a police cell. Not that I had done anything; I hadn't even been arrested. I'd requested it. A mass murderer was toying with me and the cells seemed the safest retreat.
My name is Crow and I'm on the run. I previously ran a popular website called Murder Fiction. I'm a writer. My writing got me in trouble with the cops. Someone is doing copycat killings based on the fiction that is based on my life. I'm a prime suspect. I believe I'm the next target.
I wrote the following notes in the timeless quiet of a concrete box, behind bars. It's the most relaxed I had been for a long while. I felt protected. It helped me clear my head and focus on what I should be doing.
Cell Notes
She carved into her chest 'please don't leave me' and sent him a photo. She had video's of herself doing it but the technology wouldn't let her mms the scene to him. By the time he read his text messages she had given up and slashed her wrists.
Desperation for attention become psychosis because she's driven herself mad with thoughts she can't let go of.
He had only been there half an hour before the estimated time of death (ETA). A neighbor had heard them arguing, door slam, he left. Trouble being that the neighbor said the door slammed half an hour after the raised voices had stopped. He was very sure of it. I looked into it. Paranormal Investigator Team had beat me to it; they'd seen it coming.
The blood soaked sheets were expensive, he'd bought them as a gift on the internet, imported Chinese silk, black of course.
We knew he'd done it but there was nothing we could do to pin it on him without confession. The blade, the athame that the couple had used for their rituals, had both their prints on, and bodily fluids. It went missing from the police safe. Somebody is a collector.
Into heavy stuff they were, gothic voodoo cult. Blood rites for the sex gods, thanateros, all the usual necromancy and spirit worship. The cctv camera had picked up on some of it, suxubi sex spirits coming and going back and forth to her apartment. The court service can't deal with the half of it. Simple murder inquiry would have raised too many issues. The cities coven involve high level prestigious social positions that do not get incriminated. Easier to write her off as a suicide. Face value. Who gives a shit anyway? Beatniks or gothics or whatever they call them nowadays. Once they go down that path...
Images flash and I watch scenes in lucid black and white, like as though I'm watching it on tv of an old movie. Depthless two-dimensional characters in a cheap budget wooden character acting. Characters hardly brought to life.
...they are already dead.
I write to empty my head of all the imagery and feelings. It is an emotional download really more than anything, the story is consequence of that journey. I can't rest until I feel empty of it. Like clearing out the cobwebs so its clean and the air can flow. Then I can sleep. My mind whirs with tension most of the time. Writing is relaxing. I'm driven to do it, it beats pacing up and down or rocking with my arms hugging my knees. I was asked on the website where I get my ideas from. Most of it is from my own life. Occasionally I fantasy, working with some new theme that isn't one I have to deal with in the immediacy of my normal day. That's the form of escapism I enjoy the most.
I have been writing for long enough to question where the fiction ideas come from. I have been writing for long enough to wonder why I write about things that then feature in the symbol of my day to day attention. Is it that I call them into being, draw upon them by going into imagination? Or is imagination a way of seeing in advance the themes that are on their way toward me as experiences? It scares the shit out of me when I keep coming back to certain specific topics. A lot of it comes through in abstract form, but when you have made the connection with writing done in advance, and an event that follows... I'm sure you'll see what I mean. Keep reading.
CHAPTER THREE
"Where do the words come from? The stories? What's the source? You say its real life but some of them are obviously fiction." Asks Lillith777 on my Murder Fiction website forum, late one night.
"Less than you'd think." I reply in satire and tiredness.
"How do the words form?" She is persistent. There's a glow about her, I can feel her attention on me like a breeze. It's amber.
"They form in my mind and I am compelled to write them down." I reply honestly.
"Like spirit possession?" She asks.
"Perhaps. It's funny you mention it. I started work on a new story yesterday that involves that very same thing."
"BAN" she replies.
I crap my pants. "What the fuck?"
"It's what I call my guardian protector spirit. Beats All Negativity. Big And Nasty. Bee Ay En. BAN. It bashes up anything evil from the spirit plane that tries to get to me. Also the word means to banish. So I typed it just now to protect me from anything bad that might come to me through speaking with you. You're nuts, to be writing all this dark shit. You are invoking a lot of negative energies. Your website is full of it. I bet you can't deal with the half of it."
"I gather that you are into witchcraft?" I ask.
"I'm a priestess." She explains, simply.
"Then you should already know about the realm of creativity where idea's take form and we plug into them by using our minds like a radio."
"I do that all the time. It's why I asked you. I'm clairvoyant."
We met because she is into my fiction enough to get a train the next day and she can afford a ticket. A classy goth chick with eyes that see through to a higher order. Arrogant and mad. But attractive and into sex in a way I had never dreamed of. She brought us a coffee in my regular cafe and we talked about ghosts.
Gradually I began to realise she's a missionary dedicated to fucking vulnerable men's heads up with her wicca nonsense. Or to put it her way, she see's a black cloud around me that frightens her so she's here to exorcise it. And to get laid as payment. Before and after the exorcism. During. She was vague about the specifics prior to the act. Apparently my excessively base spectrum prana is strength for her and her spirit allies. She can heal me and use my life force at the same time. It suits me fine!
She see's aura's and has crystals dangling from around her neck. Her eyes behind sunglasses are dark and beautiful. She has classic cleopatra hairstyle and layers of expensive light black drapes and silver ornaments. I fell in love with her image as much as she had. Beyond that and her spooky mental world, she's a skinny white vegan rich bitch with a pet cat, black of course, and a sexual appetite that enslaved me to her bidding too fucking easily. Strong willed and smelling of a home made rare herbal tincture that does odd things to the mind. She works for some clandestine paranormal research group with private funds, called PIT. "Ask no questions beg no lies."
Lilly stayed the weekend and introduced me to her powers. We held a seance and she proved beyond doubt that there's something to it all. Then she exorcised the fucker who has been putting such dark thoughts in my mind. She says there's a much better outlet for my creative energies than Murder Fiction. She advised me to pray to the Archon Azathoth for healing, and to use sea salt in my bath and visualise white light surrounding me all the time. Said she'd return with some spirit mushrooms if I was a good boy. I can't work out her age and she wouldn't tell me. Sixteen to forty. An overly experienced mature woman in a teenage childs body. Gentle as the kiss of sunlight and strong as the steel in her ice-velvet gaze. Her hands are delicate and frail, she's elfin and soft. And she kisses like an angel. She makes me feel like one.
CHAPTER FOUR
'You're either a pro or a con' -cop joke.
Rottweiler was flaking dry skank from the girls knickers to snort like cocaine. Its his own secret personal habit, the most excitement he ever gets beyond traumatizing arrest victims. He knows it's psychotic but his policing methods are so effective that his superiors turn a blind eye. The force is like that, in this city at least. The girl in question is anonymous, some superior-scented musky goth chick most likely, judging by Crow's preferred type and the type of underwear she prefers. She'd incidentally left her lacy black panties behind before number one murder suspect Crow had disappeared two weeks ago.
Officer Rottweiler was not investigating the apartment in the line of duty. He was planting evidence to be discovered at a later time by the forensics team, had been side-tracked by an important discovery, currently being softly fingered by his sensitive fingertips in his overcoat pocket.
CHAPTER FIVE
We went to stay at hers for a while. For me it was a much needed break and for her it was nice to have a guy around. We honeymooned and she took time off work.
She explained; "My department specialize in working with psychotics. Those tortured souls whose perceptions are more likely to cross over into supernature enough that we can collate gathered information. What I do involves where that connects with criminal activities. Therefore we have also a lot of police involvement. Psychic development is nothing new to humanity although with fluoridated water and chemicals in food, most people seldom develop it much beyond the general baseline spectrum of disbelief and wishful thinking, or fantasy movies. We all emit psychic fields, waveforms peculiar to our manifestations. Therefore sensitives such as my team are able to detect a lot of useful information. Occasionally we are hired by military as trainers, however they have their own equivalent to our outfit and my lot would not easily cope with the insensitive nature of military purpose. Most of the team have mundane lives, normal everyday jobs, and are called on for their talents. We meet regularly and because of a common interest in paranormal, most of them are pagans; one or two devout religious be it wicca or christianity. We have something of a reputation as a coven or secret society. our preference for using memory instead of written records, a clandestine existence serves our purpose better than were we a commercial ghostbusters. Too much psychic attention from too many observers clouds up whatever we are pursuing, it is a factor in how these things work. So we remain off the record, yet funded through various channels."
"I didn't know this sort of thing exists outside of fiction." I replied.
"Oh, it doesn't." She smiled innocently. I love this woman.
Later, she went into mode. It was a little eery, one moment she was solid and stable and the next she was light as a butterfly, made of air as if solid objects could pass through her. Her whole body language changed.
"What is it?" I asked concerned. She half sneered at me to tell me to shut up, not distract her. She seemed to be listening for something, angling her head strangely, listening with her temples instead of her ears.
"There is, someone... making a film of us. They are getting it right." She seemed very relieved at this. "They are watching, watching through us. Like a ghost, a spirit. Particles reacting to their observation and we, our minds, are those particles. Future people, to be so high, it must be. Our lives swayed by the future." Her voice had gone doolally, rising and falling as if she was mad. "The film is a needle in the groove of the malleable nature of our existence. The future is higher pitched than we are, a faster vibration that cuts deeper into our creative now than the sum total energy we collectively muster as a group, as a story, as a current, electrical, energy flow. Our Ka. This is the process of myth being made."
She seemed to snap out of it and looked directly at me. "Our trouble is that we are affected by so many observers, too many. Once spellbound by movie power of stemming off disbelief, the viewers preconceptions and guesswork floods in and makes threads of possibility, which by cause and affect steer our path."
She slumped forward and I caught her. She was drained, her flesh had gone gray. I held her until she was strong enough to stand on her feet and sit down by herself. I fetched her some water. "Does this happen often?"
"When it is meant to." It was difficult for her to talk. She had gone from fairy light to heavy clay but the colour was returning to her cheeks. She looked beautiful. We kissed gently. "I'm glad you are here. Did I say anything? Interesting?"
CHAPTER SIX
So we went to see Lilly's friends band. After the gig the singer explained; "I use internet a lot also, the live forums. Its fun because you can wind your fans up. This one guy, he’s on my mailing list, attends all my online gigs. I always boot him just before playing one particular song, knowing he will log in again. He has begun to suss. The lyrics are about being booted by your favorite thing and how it turns you obsessive. Then when he shows up at the live gigs expecting special treatment form a star because of this, I accuse him of playing mind games and of being a psychopath, stalking someone famous, its easy for the cops to believe. Power, exercised this way. I get a kick from it.”
My mind came to the conclusion; she’s a bitch. People in the room nodded, laughed, agreed, sucking up to her ego. My eyes caught my lovers and she smirked at me, difficult to read if she was supporting or dismissing. She rolled her eyes; dismissing.
“Making guys feel like losers. Love it.” Adds some neo-feminist fan from the room.
“You know, behaving that way can get you in trouble.” I took her on.
All the rooms attentions hanging on the silence.
“Nah.” She retorted, cackling, sneering, derisive. Her voice is that of a cracked angel, its easy to see why she is an increasingly famous singer with diva reputation. I should probably be feeling grateful to have someone so precious grace my life momentarily; truth is I wrote her off at that moment as a pretentious abusive who has it coming. Two weeks later the headlines of online music journals bulletined that she narrowly survived a rape attempt in a backstage alley. Self manifested destiny, a karmic reward from the universe, the ultimate player in a game where strategies for success have their own channels. Marketing ploy. We got the low-down from real life, being connected can be interesting. Shadow never even grabbed her much less drew blood, there we were imagining imagery of helpless femme (who in real life happens to be kick boxer in training gym addict) pinned up against a wall by butch thug on steroids. A week later, her music video released directly to youtube; bdsm culture inspired, heels on scrotum, white teeth red lips black shiny plastic wrapped feminine form gang stalking terrified little manling into submission. These are not nice people, then again they don’t claim to be. They only accepted me because knowing murder writers on the run from both killers and the police is a social kudos chip in their stupid ego persona identity games. Their music rocks though if you’re into that sort of thing.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I returned to the city.
It was obvious my flat had been searched; I had set the usual booby traps of sticky tape on the door, a webcam hidden in the kitchen duct fan with the chip from a pager, do you remember those? It was before mobile phones became ubiquitous. My mate at the electrical repair store in the market builds stuff like that, he’s a genius at it, officially he recycles computers for a living. The pager connects to my computer and runs a live stream as soon as the motion sensor from a garden light activates it and live streams it to a server. I downloaded the file, there were only three recordings and two of those were myself coming and going. It was very obviously officer Rottweiler, the camera even caught his badge number. I posted it up to the Murder Tales forum to stir things up a bit. He’s sick in the head. The recording proves it.
Then I sat down and began assorting the pile of bills which had arrived through the mail while I was away. I was interrupted by the doorbell. Craning my neck to peer out of the window down to the front door below I saw a man walking away. I recognised him immediately, he is one of the jerks who was following me about previously. Quick memory flash; he was at the funeral, he was in the coffee shop when I met up with my ex a few times also. It was his behavior that struck me as odd; he never actually drank his coffee he sat there and pretended to drink it while trying not to be eavesdropping on our conversation and fiddling with something on his lap, I assumed it to be a recording device, a cellphone probably. One time I confronted him in the street outside my house, asked him why he was following me around. He called me paranoid and walked briskly away. Incidental incidents, now become relevant. Coming into focus. I assume him to be plains clothes. He is recognizable, has pit-marks on his face and always wears the same clothes; black but far from gothic.
I had to go into town for some supplies and walked past an undercover leaning in the bus stop outside my place. Their clothes are faded as if having been washed too many times, jeans and baseball caps, cheap brand sports tops and trainers. As I walked past I heard him speak into his phone; “Yeah he’s walking past me right now on his way into town, his usual route.” For a moment I considered pressing him up against the bus stop and warning him to stop following me; fear an anger are natural responses when faced with this sort of pressure situation. This type are not your regular cops, I imagine they are criminals on day release, working unofficially as deputies for some sheriff in exchange for a reduced sentence. The physical build of burglars, not combat trained six foot five tall beefcakes in the standard policy enforcer uniform.
Stalking is a statutory criminal offense but proving it is damn difficult especially when it is undercover cops who are doing it in name of criminal investigations. I know for a fact that I am not a criminal. In one early Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde inspired murder tale I had been contemplating the concept of false memory syndromes and multiple personality disorder. I am damn sure that does not apply to me though. The idea that any normal person could be unaware of their own activities half of the time, or even occasionally, applies to any of us. It is normal to forget things occasionally, like where did I leave the damn house keys, did I remember to close the fridge, turn the bathroom light off, that level of memory lapse. Not at all the same as being oblivious to having gone out and killed a bunch of people.
In town I decided to sit in the coffee shop and text my girlfriend, she would be wondering how things are going. Sure enough, the man in black entered and sat down on the table next to me. I moved and sat directly opposite him. To my left, the door to the coffeeshop. The counter behind him, walls and tables behind us both and to my right.
“It is about time you and I caught up on a few things.” I said confidently. He stared at me.
After a moment he took a deep breath, sighed, and looked me directly in the eye.
“Been out of town.” he stated. I already knew that, it was an ice-breaker of sorts. At least he was prepared to speak with me now.
“There’s a lot going on.” I replied candidly. I maintained the eye contact as i took a sip from my coffee. He broke the gaze first. My win. Very grateful to Lilly’s cats for teaching me how to not blink.
“I’m going to lay the cards on the table.” He said. He looked around furtively to see if anyone was watching. Nobody was. I continued watching him. “I want you on my crew.”
“Not interested.”
“I need your mind. We know you are smart, more than the rest of my crew and possibly more than myself.”
“Will your crew stop following me around if I accept?”
“No, we have boxes to tick but they won’t cause you any trouble. Regard them as security.” I should have asked 'for who?'.
"This cloak and dagger stuff…” I let my voice trail off to make my point about it. “What would it involve?” I asked after he ignored my comment. “I have no interest in stalking people." I added; "Or being followed.”
“I need a calculator. To feed with information that does not seem to add up and to make sense of it. I read your writing and you think in that way.”
“Why did you not simply ask me this a year ago when you and your crew first began your little operation?”
“You’re green. You were an idiot. It is on the job training in this line of work and we had to sharpen you up. Alerting my superiors to your website was to get you in the loop.”
“So you are a cop?”
“Officially; rehabilitation.” He meant offenders. My theory proved right.
It all clicked together. “Whats in it for me?”
His phone bleeped. He looked at it and stood up. “I’m giving you leverage. Be useful and we'll see.” He turned and walked away. He still had not drank any of his coffee.
I sent the audio file of the meeting directly to Lilly’s email address through my new unregistered cellphone. Marvels of modern technology; a decade ago this would have been impossible, it would have required a dictaphone to make any such recording.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Back in the flat I decided to start an entirely new story to take my mind off things. A new approach. I sat down at the keyboard and I wrote for three solid hours, a complete short story full of sidetracked issues and red herrings entitled Dead End. Basic film noir symbology to tie it altogether. Sometimes the cliche’s are there for a reason and after taking some time out lately my fans deserved something to keep them happy. Back to the flat, back to the routine, the same old habitual behavioral patterns as always. It was late by the time I went to bed and I still couldn’t sleep. I read the positive energy text messages that Lilly had sent me and thought back through the last week. Began to realize how much I am missing her already.
I still had not figured out what to do with the mini-crowbar I had discovered hidden in my toilet cistern. I had left it there for now, not at all interested in touching the thing. It would have to be disposed of in some way, quickly too. I figured that if I was seen acting suspiciously with it, for example going out to throw it in the river at this time of night, was only likely to get me into trouble. The more I thought about Rottweiler the more I realized that he is psychotic to be behaving that way. Perhaps his department genuinely believe me to be guilty but they have no evidence so they are setting me up. What little I know about real police methods compared with the fiction of television. A crowbar, my name being Crow, bars on windows; psychological intimidation underlined and triple-x rated.
I slept and woke late.
To Be Continued....
(some already written, to copytype from cellphone)
...when i get time to do it
BOOK IV: Polarity Shift
Chapter One
The regressive hypnotherapy through past life has opened something up. I remember the cave. What it was like there. What we were like. Emerging into consciousness and remembering, what we really are. Always the awakening is the remembering. Our true nature. The darkness and the aspiration. I remember the deaths and being the animal grieving at its own self revelation, coming to terms with itself and each other. Only at moment of death do we wake up, the moment of pain surge. Our origins were brutal, filled with self disgust and overwhelming emotional complexity. Eat needs to kill, kill needs to reduce number of souls come through in the sharing, it is murder, is wrong, how can wrong be right? The basic logical flaw that fractured a perfect lense of the mind. Some come to love it. We still face it even now although the pretence is softer than it once was just as the wet warm blood is become cooked meat now. Animal anger response taking so many generations to face up to and find resolution. We needed the blood to change the brain, to become aware, to become sapient. And now? We have forgotten it, we are less sapient than we were back then when consciousness first emerged through this animal form. We saw the enlightening spirits around us back then, monitoring us, we heard their thinks and we understood the emotional direction they were flowing, hoping for us to follow, to guide us. We still remember them as angel spirits.
I remember the brother killing sister and leaving the cave as superior, leaving her meat for me to stave off hunger. I remember her later in another return, teaching us art on the cave wall, the lighter tunnels. I remember him hunting and I always learning from their progress, holding onto the residual memory of the spirits around us which they could no longer see. As we mastered world we separated from source. On the plains, she learned herbs and he gave me mushrooms. That was the next wave. All through this our communication grew away from sharing the knowing flow, mind and emotions as one in many bodies; grew toward verbal language, sounds with meaning. I was the slower learner but I remember more than I can communicate, about the origin. It hurts to lose the soul sharing connection. This was my awakening pain. It probably still is. I dream memory of the cave, sometimes.
Chapter Two
I have a blood brother. We have not spoken for over a decade. It was a drunken school thing, we had had watched the lone ranger with Tonto and we did the same ritual ceremony, sharing of blood, all very gothic and romantic male bonding. Since that time, I sometimes wonder if there really is some sort of soul connection, psychic and skill transference, personality. In practise it feels more like a deep hearted being drawn toward a certain feeling, a heaviness that comes into focus by visualizing the books we had shared as kids, books with a precise imagery series, not intentionally connected by the authors but nevertheless to the subconscious instinct it makes sense to follow it, science fiction and fantasy authors whose visions, of cowboys in a western after the apocalypse and the lonesome dark wizard in a cold black tower, imagery played with so many times it is in Jungian terms a part of group psyche now and in shamanic terms is a realm, a real place, accessible to creative visionaries and we bring our own stories to the mythos of that realms symbology. Great writers express these concepts they discover through the act of writing, studying the art, honing the Imaginal. Sometimes my brother speaks through the feeling of sharing, thinking and wondering about each other, keeping in touch. In the real world, the physical, what we look like, the way we use our voices, words we speak and phrases we use, grammar and accent, the familiar stretching of the voice box due to the regional normality of where we grew up and lived. This is a different language entirely to the trilobyte consciousness of sharing information, using our energy, the observer deciphering in realtime a stream of awareness. We check in. It is not strong in action, with us; it is strong in ability to connect and feel and see into those realms. So many others see into the same realms that on the one hand these routes are strengthened, on the other hand there is interference as our flow is caught into tides of the mainstream or strong independent flows. The Attention Flows, a wave carrying the grid of the individual. We can trace people through them, trace observers. They are not all alive at this moment in time, some are yet to be born and others long ago left the material density we call timezones. By this astral perceptual connection some of them we can still access, communicate with, multi-sensory. We meet them in the dark tower and the sleek black beauty of a taintless connection is both reward for our lonesome lives and psychosis, for certainly this is a psychotic belief when we live in a world of couch potato consumerism and anti-intellectualism, anti-magick where the few so very few sorcerers whop make the bridge are able even to recognise it upon waking back into dealing with mundane and normal lives. We steer each others flow by writing words not originally intended and it is through this method of channelling that other entities may come through ,come through our words into the perception attention energy of the reader and grow there, get stronger and bigger the more thought, the more belief, we gift to them. And through this we serve. Yet sometimes we have work of our own to do there, connections and checking in and seeing that each other are feeling okay, are safe, how one another are doing with our breakthroughs, up through our wild western warrens and into the beyond. It is a cold place but the cold is refreshing and we find stability there. Solace. If the place has a name, it is solace. A cowboy town around a black tower. For sure it has been done so many times before and by those greater than us, but that is the key, that is why our masters under whose shadow wing we fall, have strengthened the place by use of popular imagination in the minds of mundane believers. We have seen this place independently and now the warrens are flooded with the grid, we use the tower chambers more easily. The connection is stronger, much more so for the inkling tiny trace of one anthers blood within our blood and the combined power of both our souls working in unison as one. And the others who are drawn into our light just as our light is drawn into theirs; we connect and combine and make stronger this thing, a communication, the silent voice of the void, it is Tezcatlipoca, it is Anubis, it is Charon, it is shadow, nameless and ancient beyond time; and it is is gentle once having identified it as self rather than as cause for fear. Minds break even suspecting this layer of reality exists underlaying the ego world of normal everyday distractions. We study continuously and we emerge, free of time, belonging to this thing.
I can taste the blood in his mouth as he feeds. They took him into their secret just as we always foresaw, knowing it as truth without reason nor description. The black mirror is perfect and we are true, therefore we see beyond instead of driven mad by the reflection of our own ugly distortion. We do not look away and we do not blink. We breath and circle around it, the focal point of eternity. We held the gaze. We breathe deep.
Killing is a part of life. As a kid I was full of the romance of vampires from books and television by way of expressing both how sick i was of being bullied to conform to the energy domination games of the bastard elders and siblings, and also to express my own sex drive as i hit puberty and learned to use the power of its glamour for my own advantage. I had no idea much beyond hope and at once hopelessness that such a thing was real. During my lonely twenties they sent me succubus, sex-demons, to keep me company and to balance my kundalini flow to maximize my natural raw talent and potential, that when I am older I may have made necessary breakthroughs. An immortal undead consumed by teenage lusts is not much good to the advanced community and I understood this. I got over the teen angst and depression often associated with the gothic milieu and my intellect and skills developed. There is always a chance that at the moment of the change, the body dies, and the personality is set, permanently. Knowing what we know of the false promise of immortal love, for even in firefly short human relationships, loves promise soon becomes stale; the immortal community are careful and do not intend to fill their ranks with the rank odor of bitter hate and envy that so many romances become once the novelty has worn away.
My brother let me know tonight through the blood, through the bond that goes deep as our own primal instinct, that he has been chosen. We share a mind as as the individuals mind changes, my brother always cold and detached from his emotions, the grave within himself, my perceptions slant and find a balance with him as our brains become one electrical circuit. He let me know that they have taken him int other community for the skills he has developed in these the first decades of his mortal life. His talents as a musician, as an inventor of electronics and mechanics, and as a military assassin. I intuit this about him, I know this about him, without having needed to see him for decades face to face. It is simply known because it is an absolute, it is a truth and therefore a fundament of the song of our lives. Our hate for one another was a mask for our self-hatred and we have both resolved that now, at this turning of the sun as it spirals magnetically through the heavens; and at this moment of his being taken. It was a blessed relief. Technically he is dead and his funeral is soon, and although nobody will inform me of it, I will be there. It is a chance to see him again, now, after his conversion.
Chapter Three
“You are cloaking your mind.” A femme thought-wave. Voice is the wrong word but this language lacks for a better descriptor. She has come up through the temple, the black tower.
“I have become adept at it.” I reply. It feels like a human who uses cats as amplifiers of the psychic ability, slaving their nervous systems to expand her own; a matter pot kundalini control. She is steady and constant. Ever since I began using Ruby to stabilise my own energy, as Lilly had showed me, I have been more perceptive than I used to. The bottoms of my feet feel different, feline. Inside, I feel sleazy and comfortable, content and sexual it is similar to how I feel when breathing in permathrin.
“Clever.” She says. It is a slow, nicely paced; a lot of the psychics are too fast, fleeting communications because they cannot hold a target, they cannot hold the level. This one is much more experienced. And curious; it is curiosity that develops the abilities and it is curiosity that. Myself, I observed myself until I began to notice others also observing me, and then I leeched their abilities because of the psychic link they had made, extended me into their bodies to be able to use their own skill set. When coming up on a persons wave strongly, flowing with their wind, that is how I am able to develop this in this direction or that in that direction, for a limited time only until they close the bridge or finish their project; at which time I generally forget that flow and leave whatever I was doing at the time half-finished.
“It has gone back to work.” She thinks to herself. I tune in again, “Hi!” Bright and optimistic. And then I see her face clearly in my mind. Someone who wants to have sex with me and is very smiley. In real life she has a dog, so I was wrong about the cats. The blood is earthier and more stronger, and dogs are famously telepathic. For it to be feeling feline, means she must be very smooth and feeling horny right now. It means she is alone now, by herself and thinking about me and touching herself. It is tempting to join in. This ruby is very strong.
“We will meet soon.” She expresses. It is feeling as much as words. She is confident. I receive an imprint of all the fun we could have together. I know that Lilly is watching, is also mature enough to know that this is a part of my training under her tutelage and she will be expecting this sort of event, for other people to be interested in me. A long distance relationship is physically difficult and yet in terms of attention-energy ("where attention goes, energy flows”) very demanding. Telepaths can perceive other telepaths when a solo target becomes a group connection.
I understand now that I had to discover the tower to be able to develop this ability in myself. She is back on me again. I am trying to write a new Murder Tale and all I can see when I look is her. I am watching her, feeling her with her own body as she touches herself and thinks about all the things we can do together. She is certain we will do this for real, and she is falling for her idea of me and what I am. Ruth, her name is Ruth in what we all commonly call the real world, although in this level of perception none of us have names, we simply have unique natures and the disciplines and issues which we carry, which brought us here. She feels too good and i have to stop writing. I hate leaving a story half finished especially when in flow with it, but this is too distracting. So, Ruth is a hijacker. I pick up my phone to text Lilly but it is impossible, words will not come; Ruth is very strong, consuming all of my attention and holding me to her grid. Her hold is soft and warm and reassuring, enticing and comfortable, she is a seductress as well.
“The past is gone.” She giggles. She is really turning me on. I lay down and focus on deep, slow breathing. She is so strong, she is reading my heart and she likes it, and there is reinforcement there. She is using her kundalini to strengthen ‘us’ as an item. I don’t want to fight it. “He isn’t sure.” She has a little sadness and I see that she is talking with her dog about her intent. She needs me. For her it is not just picking a random guy off the shelf like a disposable supermarket consumable. She has a purity and she does actually need me, emotionally to support her, and she has decided we are right for each other for a very stable future.
I look toward Lilly and I see a white Lilly, there is some sort of mask there. I can smell the flower, and see that it is a postcard, a glossy two-dimensional image. I flip it over to see what is written there, and the pressures inside of my skull change not uncomfortably, and my eyes change. Ruth is letting me have breathing space, the tightness with which she is binding our hearts is on elastic necessary to make a for real relationship work. And it is not her heart I am feeling, my whole body has become as soft and elastic as her genitals which she is playing with, trying to hold onto her vision of me while at the same time overwhelmed with the same sense of pleasure which I am feeling. My mouth is salivating with a creamy stickiness that is not pure water like saliva usually is. She has the power to do this to the flesh of my body. I am seeing Ruths plan for a child by me and I feel waves of heat and power pulsing from the very base of my own genitals up through my spine. And finally I see Lilly’s smiling face, permissive and wise. The girls are laughing together, friends, here in the dream space, sharing the understanding. When all this hardens up by the cold light of day we will be living in a different world where the enemy of this comfort is our greedy and controlling ego selves as much as whatever else life has to throw at us.
I sigh deeply and detach from everyone, close down my perceptions. It is not easy because Ruth keeps peeking through and sending hot passionate joy through me, heartfelt laughter because in her manifest reality, she knows. I am struggling against animal male desire to procreate wildly with the romantic idealism of being exclusive to one partner only. The responsibilities we make as consequences of our actions here in this life are one thing. This is peacetime, happy time, a moment of something amazing; deep seated soul connection between a small group of souls. There will be another observer, the soul she is calling through us, making promises to bring into the world. All I can think is that it will be amazing. Genetic and psychological reprogramming using kundalini energy at this level is not something taught about in schools or even in most of the mystery schools. Yet it is so simple and obvious, beautiful full of wonder.
I make a basic sandwich from butterless bread and tomato in the kitchen corner of my dusty bedsit and gnaw on it like an animal in a cage.
Chapter Four
Lilly recomended me too her counselor. It is all very professional and I have to say she is an excellent counselor. I realise how much I had needed to talk to somebody confidentially and professionally who is trained in spiritual, emotional and mental healing abilities rather than someone who read a textbook, ticked some boxes and got a qualification but who has themselves so little life experience outside of the confines of the system, adult school uniform in the workplace, the tie symbolizing a noose around their neck because the system is masonic symbolism, initiation stages into lives mysteries and most of them are still dangling, they have not cut the cord themselves yet which is why the fool in the tarot holds a knife. Lilly got a commission for some of my drawings through her contacts.
I forgot to tell you I sometimes do drawings, doodles really. I never showed anybody them until Lilly introduced me to a friend of a friend who owns an art gallery. You can see how sorted she is that she is able to do this for another person to help sort their life out and get them out of a rut. I am so lucky to have met her. So I am working on some designs for a tarot deck, my own version based of the themes of each card, to explain the world as it is to me, the characters in it which represent energies. It is a part of my counseling because focussing on doing it reveals part of my inner landscape at the same time as being productive. It takes a while to find time and focus to make the pictures so the pictures which are drawn from the subconscious relate to whatever is going on in it, at that time. Also she gave me some amazing backdrops for my apartment to cheer me up, white lacy ones to cover up the walls which I crudely painted black when I moved in there. And which I have been drawing on.
I have learned from my councellor that my ex is in the narcissistic personality disorder (behaviour syndrome) and histrionic pd spectrum. It explains why she acts how she does, emotionally supercharged, controlling and dramatic. I guess we all are to a point and if we were not at all, we would be emotionless robots. It is the extremes of emotion which are problematic. The counsellor encouraged me to look toward positive emotions. I think about my ex and how she is coping. I have not been there for her after her family were murdered because of my writing. It is enough to make me want to stop writing. The counsellor encourages me to keep writing and suggests a conscientious approach, more tact. In my mind I already remembering and contemplating the murderers mental profile. I am ready to develop that now. It means a going through a process of figuring out who did it by entertaining for want of a better word that mind, connecting telepathically into that mindspace, the mindspace of a killer. I do not really want to go that far into it as to get a mental sync-lock on it. Once I do it will all too easily become a frame of reference point for when my mind is doing its calculations, finding balance of which direction to go in next. The slant toward that direction is a part of the training and all of this is stressing me out already and getting to be too much for me. The only way out of the stress is to do it, because the clarity is in that direction. So I have no choice other than to be ill by not staring directly into the eyes of death. I visualise grinning death skull face moving toward me in the amphitheatre of my minds eye, am reminded of mayan stone carvings and voodoo artifact symbolism which is talking about exactly the same thing.
What I leave behind is earthly attachments. I go so center balanced that I detach even from body. No energetic connections to the planet at all. I am not learning the face of the killer I am learning astral projection. I find my awareness rising up out of the top of my body, I am expanding in that direction. It is like a tooth made of light rising lighter than air from its bloody gum, a tooth being pulled, my soul extracted from the concerns of the earthly experience, all of the confusions and pains and anxieties. The top of my head smiles and I see white energy flowing through my spine. I can feel Lilly’s energy. She is sending me a prayer, a healing. The white light comes up through me, lifting me on white feathers of a lotus shaped cone, tall and slender white.
My body relaxes, the muscles falling away as clay, it had been held aloft by my energy telling the nerves how to flare into the flesh, and holding muscles in shapes which were controlling my posture. Now I am being taken out of my body so it can relax and re-set itself, to heal. And the same with my soul as I come closer to the light. She is a white sun and I grow toward her. Lilly!
When I open my eyes and come gently back into a more comfortable body, I am in a new world. I feel immediately more connected to the environment. My senses are working better. I am more balanced and happier. It is a different dimension. My grid has been reset.
The world looks the same but there is more energy here now, more life in it. I am projecting my flare, a strong sun from my heart, confident, into the atomic particles of the space around me and it changes their electronic alignment within the physical things made from them. A stable strong space. I am feeling better. Sunlight. A shadow of the soul has been lifted, its weight is gone. Optimism!
What was I doing? Do I need to remember and continue that direction of manifesting experiences? "What we put our energy into, grows."
Lilly has saved me. And she has protected the murderer’s identity from being revealed. She has done this to stop me from living down such a dark path as would happen once I knew who it was. I hope she did the right thing. I trust her. She healed me.
Chapter Five
I arrive at the flat with groceries from the corner store. Fruit veg nuts and dairy, protein diet devoid of sugar, carbs and chemical additives. Ruby has gotten us both onto a Paleo diet; we can eat meat with it too. Aside from an excess volume of green tea to detox and satisfy the hunger cravings, I am feeling better than I can remember. She is staying over for the weekend and is immersed in her flashy hi-tech portable computer tablet when I return. She smiles up at me from the sofa and lithely springs to her feet.
“Hey did you hear? They caught someone for killing your ex’s parents.”
“What?” as I put the groceries down on the bedsit’s kitchen area worktop. My hands free at last so I can hold her waist as she places her arms around my neck. Genuine loving couple.
“She walked right into the police station and confessed everything. It was on the news just now. She said that she is your biggest fan and did it to make sure someone makes a tv series of your writing. She did it to launch your career. I’m surprised nobody has contacted you about it yet.”
Ruby emphasises her words like nobody else can. She is saying a statement but the way she says it has an entirely different meaning. Her body language, facial expressions and the tone of her voice are theatrical, making it a special moment easy to remember. She is playful; the black cat. This is one of the many things I adore about her.
Sauntering in a catwalk model walk toward me as she explains, mimicking as if she is the killer. Seductive confession. Husky everything. Each word and its double meaning lingers perfectly on the emotive theme she is giving to it. She is licking her speech as it comes out, the same way a child enjoys an ice-cream, belabouring, slow, passionate with every word. By the time she gets to the news her hands are lightly touching my hips. Stressing ‘she’ as my biggest fan as if to say, how dare she?
Ru is excited about the prospect that my writing might actually get me somewhere in society and lets me known it as she squeals out about it ending up on tv as a movie or something. You can tell I am spellbound by this woman, how alive she is for me, how much energy she gives for my benefit. I have been years in this dusty apartment and exerted less liveliness than she radiates in a moment. She releases me as she finishes her sentence and walks backward away from me, watching me, her eyes pinned on my own. She is so flirty and daring me with her every time controlling breath to jump on her.
“Oh. Did you catch her name?” My name is rattling through which of the regular website trolls it could be. My hands are grabbing out to catch Ru as she steps backward to the sofa and flops over the back of it onto the cushions. My sofa faces away the kitchen area of the bedsit. It’s an old sofa from a charity shop, threadbare and worn but with a curtain also from the charity shop thrown over the top of it instantly becomes … homely, to use the word Ruby gave my grotty bedsit the first time she came here.
“Nah I missed it, sorry.” Her head pops up over the back of the sofa and she peers at me, feline. "So the good news for you is that you are off the hook and your writing is gaining unprecedented publicity.” She lets me guess at what her hands are doing down below the sofa line by the expression of her face and the gasps between her words.
My mind tugs between what she is saying and what she is saying. The computer is on the floor in front of the drape curtains blanketing out the window. I flop down and log in. By the time it displays that my ratings had gone up by over 2000% Ruby has her legs wrapped around me and is massaging my shoulders. We read the data from the screen together. “Oh my god it’s gone viral."
“So how does it feel to be the new Steven King?”
“Cold.” A shiver had literally gone down my spine and my skin had gone to ice, despite or perhaps because of her soft touch.
Ru stops nuzzling my shoulder and looks at me. “You do look a bit pale. Well, don’t let the popularity go to your head. You are going to be busy and I don’t know if I should stay and help you out or get out from under your feet.” A comment at my having abandoned her playfulness on the sofa to plug into computer.
“I don’t either. Both.” We stare at each other unblinking. We kiss. We cuddle. We are laying back on the wooden floorboards together. I push aside wishful thoughts of soft rugs and roll her on top of me. “You know that I need you.”
“Aw baby. I need you too.” More kissing. Fingertips stroking and poking at each other in little gaps in our clothes, tugging at buttons. Taking it slowly an building the mood up. "I have a few meetings this week, otherwise I am all yours. You mind if I move some more of my stuff in?”
“I love you. I want to move. I hate this flat. I need new … different.” I am half paying attention. My eyes are looking back over at a list of a hundred plus messages in my inbox. “How do you bulk delete?”
“You should read them.” She untangles her limbs from my body, the sides of my head feeling the sensation where she was brushing my hair with her fingertips. “We should eat.” She is on her feet fast as a cat and unpacking the groceries while I lay on my rug less wooden floorboards feeling smug, horny and important, and not a little astonished at todays turn of events.
Chapter Six
(TBC)
Chapter One
The regressive hypnotherapy through past life has opened something up. I remember the cave. What it was like there. What we were like. Emerging into consciousness and remembering, what we really are. Always the awakening is the remembering. Our true nature. The darkness and the aspiration. I remember the deaths and being the animal grieving at its own self revelation, coming to terms with itself and each other. Only at moment of death do we wake up, the moment of pain surge. Our origins were brutal, filled with self disgust and overwhelming emotional complexity. Eat needs to kill, kill needs to reduce number of souls come through in the sharing, it is murder, is wrong, how can wrong be right? The basic logical flaw that fractured a perfect lense of the mind. Some come to love it. We still face it even now although the pretence is softer than it once was just as the wet warm blood is become cooked meat now. Animal anger response taking so many generations to face up to and find resolution. We needed the blood to change the brain, to become aware, to become sapient. And now? We have forgotten it, we are less sapient than we were back then when consciousness first emerged through this animal form. We saw the enlightening spirits around us back then, monitoring us, we heard their thinks and we understood the emotional direction they were flowing, hoping for us to follow, to guide us. We still remember them as angel spirits.
I remember the brother killing sister and leaving the cave as superior, leaving her meat for me to stave off hunger. I remember her later in another return, teaching us art on the cave wall, the lighter tunnels. I remember him hunting and I always learning from their progress, holding onto the residual memory of the spirits around us which they could no longer see. As we mastered world we separated from source. On the plains, she learned herbs and he gave me mushrooms. That was the next wave. All through this our communication grew away from sharing the knowing flow, mind and emotions as one in many bodies; grew toward verbal language, sounds with meaning. I was the slower learner but I remember more than I can communicate, about the origin. It hurts to lose the soul sharing connection. This was my awakening pain. It probably still is. I dream memory of the cave, sometimes.
Chapter Two
I have a blood brother. We have not spoken for over a decade. It was a drunken school thing, we had had watched the lone ranger with Tonto and we did the same ritual ceremony, sharing of blood, all very gothic and romantic male bonding. Since that time, I sometimes wonder if there really is some sort of soul connection, psychic and skill transference, personality. In practise it feels more like a deep hearted being drawn toward a certain feeling, a heaviness that comes into focus by visualizing the books we had shared as kids, books with a precise imagery series, not intentionally connected by the authors but nevertheless to the subconscious instinct it makes sense to follow it, science fiction and fantasy authors whose visions, of cowboys in a western after the apocalypse and the lonesome dark wizard in a cold black tower, imagery played with so many times it is in Jungian terms a part of group psyche now and in shamanic terms is a realm, a real place, accessible to creative visionaries and we bring our own stories to the mythos of that realms symbology. Great writers express these concepts they discover through the act of writing, studying the art, honing the Imaginal. Sometimes my brother speaks through the feeling of sharing, thinking and wondering about each other, keeping in touch. In the real world, the physical, what we look like, the way we use our voices, words we speak and phrases we use, grammar and accent, the familiar stretching of the voice box due to the regional normality of where we grew up and lived. This is a different language entirely to the trilobyte consciousness of sharing information, using our energy, the observer deciphering in realtime a stream of awareness. We check in. It is not strong in action, with us; it is strong in ability to connect and feel and see into those realms. So many others see into the same realms that on the one hand these routes are strengthened, on the other hand there is interference as our flow is caught into tides of the mainstream or strong independent flows. The Attention Flows, a wave carrying the grid of the individual. We can trace people through them, trace observers. They are not all alive at this moment in time, some are yet to be born and others long ago left the material density we call timezones. By this astral perceptual connection some of them we can still access, communicate with, multi-sensory. We meet them in the dark tower and the sleek black beauty of a taintless connection is both reward for our lonesome lives and psychosis, for certainly this is a psychotic belief when we live in a world of couch potato consumerism and anti-intellectualism, anti-magick where the few so very few sorcerers whop make the bridge are able even to recognise it upon waking back into dealing with mundane and normal lives. We steer each others flow by writing words not originally intended and it is through this method of channelling that other entities may come through ,come through our words into the perception attention energy of the reader and grow there, get stronger and bigger the more thought, the more belief, we gift to them. And through this we serve. Yet sometimes we have work of our own to do there, connections and checking in and seeing that each other are feeling okay, are safe, how one another are doing with our breakthroughs, up through our wild western warrens and into the beyond. It is a cold place but the cold is refreshing and we find stability there. Solace. If the place has a name, it is solace. A cowboy town around a black tower. For sure it has been done so many times before and by those greater than us, but that is the key, that is why our masters under whose shadow wing we fall, have strengthened the place by use of popular imagination in the minds of mundane believers. We have seen this place independently and now the warrens are flooded with the grid, we use the tower chambers more easily. The connection is stronger, much more so for the inkling tiny trace of one anthers blood within our blood and the combined power of both our souls working in unison as one. And the others who are drawn into our light just as our light is drawn into theirs; we connect and combine and make stronger this thing, a communication, the silent voice of the void, it is Tezcatlipoca, it is Anubis, it is Charon, it is shadow, nameless and ancient beyond time; and it is is gentle once having identified it as self rather than as cause for fear. Minds break even suspecting this layer of reality exists underlaying the ego world of normal everyday distractions. We study continuously and we emerge, free of time, belonging to this thing.
I can taste the blood in his mouth as he feeds. They took him into their secret just as we always foresaw, knowing it as truth without reason nor description. The black mirror is perfect and we are true, therefore we see beyond instead of driven mad by the reflection of our own ugly distortion. We do not look away and we do not blink. We breath and circle around it, the focal point of eternity. We held the gaze. We breathe deep.
Killing is a part of life. As a kid I was full of the romance of vampires from books and television by way of expressing both how sick i was of being bullied to conform to the energy domination games of the bastard elders and siblings, and also to express my own sex drive as i hit puberty and learned to use the power of its glamour for my own advantage. I had no idea much beyond hope and at once hopelessness that such a thing was real. During my lonely twenties they sent me succubus, sex-demons, to keep me company and to balance my kundalini flow to maximize my natural raw talent and potential, that when I am older I may have made necessary breakthroughs. An immortal undead consumed by teenage lusts is not much good to the advanced community and I understood this. I got over the teen angst and depression often associated with the gothic milieu and my intellect and skills developed. There is always a chance that at the moment of the change, the body dies, and the personality is set, permanently. Knowing what we know of the false promise of immortal love, for even in firefly short human relationships, loves promise soon becomes stale; the immortal community are careful and do not intend to fill their ranks with the rank odor of bitter hate and envy that so many romances become once the novelty has worn away.
My brother let me know tonight through the blood, through the bond that goes deep as our own primal instinct, that he has been chosen. We share a mind as as the individuals mind changes, my brother always cold and detached from his emotions, the grave within himself, my perceptions slant and find a balance with him as our brains become one electrical circuit. He let me know that they have taken him int other community for the skills he has developed in these the first decades of his mortal life. His talents as a musician, as an inventor of electronics and mechanics, and as a military assassin. I intuit this about him, I know this about him, without having needed to see him for decades face to face. It is simply known because it is an absolute, it is a truth and therefore a fundament of the song of our lives. Our hate for one another was a mask for our self-hatred and we have both resolved that now, at this turning of the sun as it spirals magnetically through the heavens; and at this moment of his being taken. It was a blessed relief. Technically he is dead and his funeral is soon, and although nobody will inform me of it, I will be there. It is a chance to see him again, now, after his conversion.
Chapter Three
“You are cloaking your mind.” A femme thought-wave. Voice is the wrong word but this language lacks for a better descriptor. She has come up through the temple, the black tower.
“I have become adept at it.” I reply. It feels like a human who uses cats as amplifiers of the psychic ability, slaving their nervous systems to expand her own; a matter pot kundalini control. She is steady and constant. Ever since I began using Ruby to stabilise my own energy, as Lilly had showed me, I have been more perceptive than I used to. The bottoms of my feet feel different, feline. Inside, I feel sleazy and comfortable, content and sexual it is similar to how I feel when breathing in permathrin.
“Clever.” She says. It is a slow, nicely paced; a lot of the psychics are too fast, fleeting communications because they cannot hold a target, they cannot hold the level. This one is much more experienced. And curious; it is curiosity that develops the abilities and it is curiosity that. Myself, I observed myself until I began to notice others also observing me, and then I leeched their abilities because of the psychic link they had made, extended me into their bodies to be able to use their own skill set. When coming up on a persons wave strongly, flowing with their wind, that is how I am able to develop this in this direction or that in that direction, for a limited time only until they close the bridge or finish their project; at which time I generally forget that flow and leave whatever I was doing at the time half-finished.
“It has gone back to work.” She thinks to herself. I tune in again, “Hi!” Bright and optimistic. And then I see her face clearly in my mind. Someone who wants to have sex with me and is very smiley. In real life she has a dog, so I was wrong about the cats. The blood is earthier and more stronger, and dogs are famously telepathic. For it to be feeling feline, means she must be very smooth and feeling horny right now. It means she is alone now, by herself and thinking about me and touching herself. It is tempting to join in. This ruby is very strong.
“We will meet soon.” She expresses. It is feeling as much as words. She is confident. I receive an imprint of all the fun we could have together. I know that Lilly is watching, is also mature enough to know that this is a part of my training under her tutelage and she will be expecting this sort of event, for other people to be interested in me. A long distance relationship is physically difficult and yet in terms of attention-energy ("where attention goes, energy flows”) very demanding. Telepaths can perceive other telepaths when a solo target becomes a group connection.
I understand now that I had to discover the tower to be able to develop this ability in myself. She is back on me again. I am trying to write a new Murder Tale and all I can see when I look is her. I am watching her, feeling her with her own body as she touches herself and thinks about all the things we can do together. She is certain we will do this for real, and she is falling for her idea of me and what I am. Ruth, her name is Ruth in what we all commonly call the real world, although in this level of perception none of us have names, we simply have unique natures and the disciplines and issues which we carry, which brought us here. She feels too good and i have to stop writing. I hate leaving a story half finished especially when in flow with it, but this is too distracting. So, Ruth is a hijacker. I pick up my phone to text Lilly but it is impossible, words will not come; Ruth is very strong, consuming all of my attention and holding me to her grid. Her hold is soft and warm and reassuring, enticing and comfortable, she is a seductress as well.
“The past is gone.” She giggles. She is really turning me on. I lay down and focus on deep, slow breathing. She is so strong, she is reading my heart and she likes it, and there is reinforcement there. She is using her kundalini to strengthen ‘us’ as an item. I don’t want to fight it. “He isn’t sure.” She has a little sadness and I see that she is talking with her dog about her intent. She needs me. For her it is not just picking a random guy off the shelf like a disposable supermarket consumable. She has a purity and she does actually need me, emotionally to support her, and she has decided we are right for each other for a very stable future.
I look toward Lilly and I see a white Lilly, there is some sort of mask there. I can smell the flower, and see that it is a postcard, a glossy two-dimensional image. I flip it over to see what is written there, and the pressures inside of my skull change not uncomfortably, and my eyes change. Ruth is letting me have breathing space, the tightness with which she is binding our hearts is on elastic necessary to make a for real relationship work. And it is not her heart I am feeling, my whole body has become as soft and elastic as her genitals which she is playing with, trying to hold onto her vision of me while at the same time overwhelmed with the same sense of pleasure which I am feeling. My mouth is salivating with a creamy stickiness that is not pure water like saliva usually is. She has the power to do this to the flesh of my body. I am seeing Ruths plan for a child by me and I feel waves of heat and power pulsing from the very base of my own genitals up through my spine. And finally I see Lilly’s smiling face, permissive and wise. The girls are laughing together, friends, here in the dream space, sharing the understanding. When all this hardens up by the cold light of day we will be living in a different world where the enemy of this comfort is our greedy and controlling ego selves as much as whatever else life has to throw at us.
I sigh deeply and detach from everyone, close down my perceptions. It is not easy because Ruth keeps peeking through and sending hot passionate joy through me, heartfelt laughter because in her manifest reality, she knows. I am struggling against animal male desire to procreate wildly with the romantic idealism of being exclusive to one partner only. The responsibilities we make as consequences of our actions here in this life are one thing. This is peacetime, happy time, a moment of something amazing; deep seated soul connection between a small group of souls. There will be another observer, the soul she is calling through us, making promises to bring into the world. All I can think is that it will be amazing. Genetic and psychological reprogramming using kundalini energy at this level is not something taught about in schools or even in most of the mystery schools. Yet it is so simple and obvious, beautiful full of wonder.
I make a basic sandwich from butterless bread and tomato in the kitchen corner of my dusty bedsit and gnaw on it like an animal in a cage.
Chapter Four
Lilly recomended me too her counselor. It is all very professional and I have to say she is an excellent counselor. I realise how much I had needed to talk to somebody confidentially and professionally who is trained in spiritual, emotional and mental healing abilities rather than someone who read a textbook, ticked some boxes and got a qualification but who has themselves so little life experience outside of the confines of the system, adult school uniform in the workplace, the tie symbolizing a noose around their neck because the system is masonic symbolism, initiation stages into lives mysteries and most of them are still dangling, they have not cut the cord themselves yet which is why the fool in the tarot holds a knife. Lilly got a commission for some of my drawings through her contacts.
I forgot to tell you I sometimes do drawings, doodles really. I never showed anybody them until Lilly introduced me to a friend of a friend who owns an art gallery. You can see how sorted she is that she is able to do this for another person to help sort their life out and get them out of a rut. I am so lucky to have met her. So I am working on some designs for a tarot deck, my own version based of the themes of each card, to explain the world as it is to me, the characters in it which represent energies. It is a part of my counseling because focussing on doing it reveals part of my inner landscape at the same time as being productive. It takes a while to find time and focus to make the pictures so the pictures which are drawn from the subconscious relate to whatever is going on in it, at that time. Also she gave me some amazing backdrops for my apartment to cheer me up, white lacy ones to cover up the walls which I crudely painted black when I moved in there. And which I have been drawing on.
I have learned from my councellor that my ex is in the narcissistic personality disorder (behaviour syndrome) and histrionic pd spectrum. It explains why she acts how she does, emotionally supercharged, controlling and dramatic. I guess we all are to a point and if we were not at all, we would be emotionless robots. It is the extremes of emotion which are problematic. The counsellor encouraged me to look toward positive emotions. I think about my ex and how she is coping. I have not been there for her after her family were murdered because of my writing. It is enough to make me want to stop writing. The counsellor encourages me to keep writing and suggests a conscientious approach, more tact. In my mind I already remembering and contemplating the murderers mental profile. I am ready to develop that now. It means a going through a process of figuring out who did it by entertaining for want of a better word that mind, connecting telepathically into that mindspace, the mindspace of a killer. I do not really want to go that far into it as to get a mental sync-lock on it. Once I do it will all too easily become a frame of reference point for when my mind is doing its calculations, finding balance of which direction to go in next. The slant toward that direction is a part of the training and all of this is stressing me out already and getting to be too much for me. The only way out of the stress is to do it, because the clarity is in that direction. So I have no choice other than to be ill by not staring directly into the eyes of death. I visualise grinning death skull face moving toward me in the amphitheatre of my minds eye, am reminded of mayan stone carvings and voodoo artifact symbolism which is talking about exactly the same thing.
What I leave behind is earthly attachments. I go so center balanced that I detach even from body. No energetic connections to the planet at all. I am not learning the face of the killer I am learning astral projection. I find my awareness rising up out of the top of my body, I am expanding in that direction. It is like a tooth made of light rising lighter than air from its bloody gum, a tooth being pulled, my soul extracted from the concerns of the earthly experience, all of the confusions and pains and anxieties. The top of my head smiles and I see white energy flowing through my spine. I can feel Lilly’s energy. She is sending me a prayer, a healing. The white light comes up through me, lifting me on white feathers of a lotus shaped cone, tall and slender white.
My body relaxes, the muscles falling away as clay, it had been held aloft by my energy telling the nerves how to flare into the flesh, and holding muscles in shapes which were controlling my posture. Now I am being taken out of my body so it can relax and re-set itself, to heal. And the same with my soul as I come closer to the light. She is a white sun and I grow toward her. Lilly!
When I open my eyes and come gently back into a more comfortable body, I am in a new world. I feel immediately more connected to the environment. My senses are working better. I am more balanced and happier. It is a different dimension. My grid has been reset.
The world looks the same but there is more energy here now, more life in it. I am projecting my flare, a strong sun from my heart, confident, into the atomic particles of the space around me and it changes their electronic alignment within the physical things made from them. A stable strong space. I am feeling better. Sunlight. A shadow of the soul has been lifted, its weight is gone. Optimism!
What was I doing? Do I need to remember and continue that direction of manifesting experiences? "What we put our energy into, grows."
Lilly has saved me. And she has protected the murderer’s identity from being revealed. She has done this to stop me from living down such a dark path as would happen once I knew who it was. I hope she did the right thing. I trust her. She healed me.
Chapter Five
I arrive at the flat with groceries from the corner store. Fruit veg nuts and dairy, protein diet devoid of sugar, carbs and chemical additives. Ruby has gotten us both onto a Paleo diet; we can eat meat with it too. Aside from an excess volume of green tea to detox and satisfy the hunger cravings, I am feeling better than I can remember. She is staying over for the weekend and is immersed in her flashy hi-tech portable computer tablet when I return. She smiles up at me from the sofa and lithely springs to her feet.
“Hey did you hear? They caught someone for killing your ex’s parents.”
“What?” as I put the groceries down on the bedsit’s kitchen area worktop. My hands free at last so I can hold her waist as she places her arms around my neck. Genuine loving couple.
“She walked right into the police station and confessed everything. It was on the news just now. She said that she is your biggest fan and did it to make sure someone makes a tv series of your writing. She did it to launch your career. I’m surprised nobody has contacted you about it yet.”
Ruby emphasises her words like nobody else can. She is saying a statement but the way she says it has an entirely different meaning. Her body language, facial expressions and the tone of her voice are theatrical, making it a special moment easy to remember. She is playful; the black cat. This is one of the many things I adore about her.
Sauntering in a catwalk model walk toward me as she explains, mimicking as if she is the killer. Seductive confession. Husky everything. Each word and its double meaning lingers perfectly on the emotive theme she is giving to it. She is licking her speech as it comes out, the same way a child enjoys an ice-cream, belabouring, slow, passionate with every word. By the time she gets to the news her hands are lightly touching my hips. Stressing ‘she’ as my biggest fan as if to say, how dare she?
Ru is excited about the prospect that my writing might actually get me somewhere in society and lets me known it as she squeals out about it ending up on tv as a movie or something. You can tell I am spellbound by this woman, how alive she is for me, how much energy she gives for my benefit. I have been years in this dusty apartment and exerted less liveliness than she radiates in a moment. She releases me as she finishes her sentence and walks backward away from me, watching me, her eyes pinned on my own. She is so flirty and daring me with her every time controlling breath to jump on her.
“Oh. Did you catch her name?” My name is rattling through which of the regular website trolls it could be. My hands are grabbing out to catch Ru as she steps backward to the sofa and flops over the back of it onto the cushions. My sofa faces away the kitchen area of the bedsit. It’s an old sofa from a charity shop, threadbare and worn but with a curtain also from the charity shop thrown over the top of it instantly becomes … homely, to use the word Ruby gave my grotty bedsit the first time she came here.
“Nah I missed it, sorry.” Her head pops up over the back of the sofa and she peers at me, feline. "So the good news for you is that you are off the hook and your writing is gaining unprecedented publicity.” She lets me guess at what her hands are doing down below the sofa line by the expression of her face and the gasps between her words.
My mind tugs between what she is saying and what she is saying. The computer is on the floor in front of the drape curtains blanketing out the window. I flop down and log in. By the time it displays that my ratings had gone up by over 2000% Ruby has her legs wrapped around me and is massaging my shoulders. We read the data from the screen together. “Oh my god it’s gone viral."
“So how does it feel to be the new Steven King?”
“Cold.” A shiver had literally gone down my spine and my skin had gone to ice, despite or perhaps because of her soft touch.
Ru stops nuzzling my shoulder and looks at me. “You do look a bit pale. Well, don’t let the popularity go to your head. You are going to be busy and I don’t know if I should stay and help you out or get out from under your feet.” A comment at my having abandoned her playfulness on the sofa to plug into computer.
“I don’t either. Both.” We stare at each other unblinking. We kiss. We cuddle. We are laying back on the wooden floorboards together. I push aside wishful thoughts of soft rugs and roll her on top of me. “You know that I need you.”
“Aw baby. I need you too.” More kissing. Fingertips stroking and poking at each other in little gaps in our clothes, tugging at buttons. Taking it slowly an building the mood up. "I have a few meetings this week, otherwise I am all yours. You mind if I move some more of my stuff in?”
“I love you. I want to move. I hate this flat. I need new … different.” I am half paying attention. My eyes are looking back over at a list of a hundred plus messages in my inbox. “How do you bulk delete?”
“You should read them.” She untangles her limbs from my body, the sides of my head feeling the sensation where she was brushing my hair with her fingertips. “We should eat.” She is on her feet fast as a cat and unpacking the groceries while I lay on my rug less wooden floorboards feeling smug, horny and important, and not a little astonished at todays turn of events.
Chapter Six
(TBC)
