Chapter Text
The murderer had claimed yet another victim.
Investigators came to refer to him as the monster. A limited, insipid appellation, Daniel had incessantly thought. Men were creatures of an acutely impoverished creativity.
To the common observer, the murders were objectively appalling. Bloodless corpses were no ordinary sight. Carcasses with ribbons wrought from their own tendons and sinews. Cadavers of cold meat with pale lilies stuffed into their wan mouths. Carrions with crimson roses sewn grotesquely into their intestines. Bedecked with jasmine, white as a burial shroud.
To the average viewer, it was butchery, and a ghastly thing to behold. They saw only the torn flesh, the blank, dull eyes, the impossible alabaster-like stillness. They recoiled before they could perceive the sublime composition. They misthought intention for madness, peerless precision for savagery, reverence for desecration. But to call him merely a monster was a slight. There was nothing common in what he created, and yet the world insisted upon granting him the most lacklustre of names.
It was the eve of a wintry Friday, when Molloy stood at the crime scene with his polaroid camera, smoking a cigarette nonchalantly with his free hand. He had secured himself a place behind the police tape, by virtue of knowing a friend, and photographed the massacre before him with eyes alit with fascination he tried, in vain, to tame.
It was the customary signature of the killer; the very same, repeated with each fresh atrocity over the past two years of his butchery and Daniel’s increasing, morbid fascination with his work. The victim was always male, aged between thirty and fifty, with a touch of the uncanny; exsanguinated. Every drop of blood had been drawn from the cadaverous body until the flesh was rendered pale as carved lustrous marble, looking less like a corpse than a statue abandoned by its debonair sculptor. And flowers, of course. They were always there, his unmistakable and exquisite mark, tucked somewhere within the vermilion carnage, waiting to be felicitously found. Tonight, it was a red dahlia, its thorned stem wound tightly about the victim’s pallid, sinuous neck.
Some of the slaughtered men had been coarse and plain-featured, others strikingly handsome. It mattered little. Beneath his hands, they all became resplendent. The comely flowers lent them grace, the bloodless pallor beautified them and sanctified the rest. In death throes, they attained a state of absolute refinement at his very hand.
Daniel shivered. The piercing cold gnawed at his bones. Having consumed the final ember of his palliative cigarette, he dropped it on the pale, wintry ground and watched it dissolve beneath the frost. He drew his worn-out leather jacket more tightly about his trembling frame. The clamour of the multitude around him faded into a dull hum. Calling it a monstrosity in its purest form, women woefully weeping, others hollering in fear, policemen cursing. But Daniel only gazed at the corpse with melancholic eyes and deemed it exceedingly, calamitously beautiful.
He had never envisaged he would make a career as an investigative journalist. His first writing endeavours were of a far gentler nature. He spent his twenties penning about the ordinary miseries of mankind, performing tawdry interviews with drug fiends, prostitutes and war heroes, and conceiving a few disordered, published works about the virus. But then, as he turned thirty, the murders began, and one by one, with dreadful regularity, they drew him in like a moth to a searing flame. He commenced writing about nothing else, just him; examining the killings, identifying recurring patterns, and evaluating possible motives.
Alice considered it reckless. She despised it.
‘What happens when he finds one of your articles?’ she asked austerely. ‘What if you piss him off and he decides to pay you a visit?’
Daniel would laugh off the suggestion. He would never openly acknowledge that, beneath his professional-curiosity-veneer, he did in fact want the killer to acquaint himself with his journalistic oeuvre.
‘He is killing only men, sweetheart,’ he would tell her, a cheeky grin forming on his pale face. ‘You’re safe.’
She threw the pillow at him. ‘I’m worried about you, Danny!’
He merely laughed once more and pulled her close for a kiss. They were bed-fellows. Alice was bright, gentle, effortlessly pretty. Yet Daniel was not built for lasting things; it was the pitiable truth he had known ever since he was a child. At the mere thought of marriage, he recoiled with disgust. Instantly, he was a frightened, frail boy staring dully at his mother, as she lay comatose and prone on the floor, after having partaken in too much benzodiazepines. He saw his drunken father standing ready to beat him senseless. He closed his weary eyes. No. He was not going back there.
‘Are the victims connected?’ Alice asked him later, as they lay side by side after their coupling, the room heavy with cigarette smoke. ‘What did all these men have in common?’
‘Hm,’ Daniel murmured as he exhaled the fumes cavalierly. ‘Nothing on paper. Rich, clean-cut, respectable. Your average next-door neighbours.’
‘So he’s just picking victims at random?’
Molloy smirked. ‘Just because we do not see the pattern, doesn’t mean it’s not there,’ he said. ‘We just haven’t fathomed it yet.’
She stole the cigarette from his sallow fingers. ‘I hope they catch him soon,’ she whispered, anxiety taking hold of her delicate voice. ‘And put him on a fucking electric chair where he belongs.’
Daniel stilled. Why did the idea strike so close to the bone? He cleared his throat, avoiding her eyes. ‘Yeah,’ he nodded, donning the guise of a good man. I just hope I get one conversation with him before they flip the goddamn switch. What a sorry pity it would be otherwise.
It was the sort of fantasy an adolescent might harbour about meeting his idol; a feverish, mortifying daydream. He longed to meet the man. Daniel was acutely aware how deranged it sounded. Preposterous; to interview the killer! But it was a burning thirst that, over the past two years, had swelled to the brink of madness. He wanted to stand before him, to ask him the questions no reporter had thought to ask, to understand the mind that conceived such atrocities, to peer for but a moment into the world as he saw it.
It was not a desire he could confess to anyone. He entombed it deep within himself, smothering it beneath layers of practised civility, where no one, not his paramours, not his friends, not even he himself, was meant to look. Professional curiosity. That was what he told himself like an adamant prayer. Yet his mask was commencing to slip. It grew harder to keep his visage still when every fresh corpse was more beautiful than the one before.
No one knew how long he stood at the crime scene that evening, staring at the exquisite carcass. By the time he at last tore his gaze away, night had fallen, the air had turned bitterly chilling, and he was sorely in need of a drink. He had no plans for the eventide; he could go back to his cramped little studio, labour over the article, indulge in powder and tobacco, and pass out before dawn. Mundanest of mundane.
Or he could have a drink. Two, perhaps. Fall into the company of a stranger, score a little coke without paying for it; that was a far sweeter prospect. Before he knew it, he was already headed for the bar.