Arnold looked across the table, over platters of steaming vegetables and buttery lobster tails, and became mesmerized by Renee’s eyes: sparkling, shiny gems set into the hollows of an alabaster face. Eyes like sapphires but bluer somehow, brighter somehow.
Eyes that transcended words.
Eyes that were emotions given life.
Eyes that transcended words.
Eyes that were emotions given life.
These emotions ached through Arnold’s chest as he looked into Renee’s eyes, and he asked, “How’s your lobster?”
Without her eyes, Renee wouldn’t have been interesting in the slightest. The head and face and body of Renee existed merely to house the eyes. Like the backdrop of canvas behind the Mona Lisa, she was nothing if not for the masterful brushstrokes that decorated her.
“Fine,” Renee said. As if she had no opinion one way or another on the matter. The same way she answered any question, spoke on any subject.
She wasn’t ugly, but you could find more personality in a cardboard box. Her body curved in the right places and her legs were long and shapely, but god, the conversation was worse than the dialogue of the latest Paul Walker film.
Her eyes-gems-emotions swept up to capture Arnold in their gaze, and Arnold felt his heart flutter in his chest. They caught him off-guard every time, wiping his mind blank and his senses numb.
They would look incredible in Mary.
Mary was really Mary-Anne-Terri-Lauren-Dana-Shelly at the moment, but at one time, Mary, alone, had been Arnold’s definition of the perfect woman. That was long before Mary began to rot, and Arnold realized perfection was something that didn’t last on its own, not forever, but must be maintained. Just like all the finer things in life.
“Would you care to come to my place?” Renee said. “For a nightcap?”
Arnold paused. He said, “Why not mine? It’s closer.”
“I’d feel much more… safe… there. I know it’s a horrible thing to say, but I don’t know you that well and…”
Arnold cut her off with a curt wave of his hand. He shook his head, his face full of understanding, his mind full of fury. He said, “Completely all right, totally, totally. Trust me, I understand. In this day and age, you can never be too careful. I’d be honored to have a drink at your place.”
“What a brilliant actor,” his future biographers would say.
“So smooth. So suave,” they would say.
Arnold would have to alter his plans. But maybe he’d take his time with this one for inconveniencing him.
His eyes shifted to the large knife in his hand. It sliced through the steak on his plate. Reddish juices dripped from the blade.
Arnold shivered, anticipating the night before him.
***
Renee’s place turned out to be a single-storied block of cracked and faded brick. A rusty mailbox leaned out into the street in front of a row of white-washed planks of fence, crooked and rotting and jutting up from the ground like the lower jaw of an old woman. Grass grew long and brown in a front yard wild and twisted with weeds.
It looked like a real dump.
“Homey,” Arnold said as he pulled into the driveway.
He followed Renee into the small house, and the inside of it was not much better off than the outside. The first thing Arnold noticed was a dirty plate on the floor. Dried, hairy crusts of red lined it like stringy veins. Old spaghetti sauce, he assumed. Behind the plate sat a fuzzy yellow recliner, orange patches holding it together like splotchy band-aides. The recliner appeared to be on the verge of unraveling. A television blared in front of it, playing one of an endless number of cable news channels.
“Homey,” Arnold repeated.
“What a biting sense of humor,” his biographers would say.
“What genius wit,” they would say.
“This way to the booze,” Renee said, and Arnold followed her.
Walking in step behind Renee, Arnold’s right hand crept ever so subtly to his coat. He patted the pocket with his flask as if to reassure himself that it was still there.
Renee passed through a living area and sidled up to an area with a small bar. She slipped behind the counter, rummaged through a tall cabinet, and finally turned with a bottle of bourbon in one hand and two small glasses in the other, held between her thumb and index finger.
“Here we are,” she said. She filled each glass with ice and poured in the bourbon. Arnold eyed Renee’s glass, wondering how to slip in the mix. He’d have to be subtle.
Renee caught his attention with eyes like twin blue flames. They glided over Arnold’s shoulder. Helpless but to do so, he followed her gaze to a travesty of art hanging from the far wall. A painting portrayed a purple dragon writhing on a backdrop of crimson flames. This would have been relatively acceptable if not for the cartoonish depiction of the dragon, all bug-eyed and snaggle-toothed, and the fact half of a chicken protruded from the dragon’s mouth. It looked like an image from a rejected Japanese children’s show.
“Impressive,” Arnold said, but “ridiculous” was the word that came to mind. He supposed the travesty worked as a good-enough distraction from the disastrous mess of the rest of the home.
He turned around, and Renee held his drink towards him. Arnold accepted the glass of bourbon with an appreciative nod. He held it up in a toast.
“To us,” he said.
“To us,” Renee agreed and raised her glass. Then they drank.
The bourbon was a slow burn through Arnold’s throat and chest. He smacked his lips and blew a long exhale. Ice tinkled in his glass. Meanwhile, the whiskey flask felt like a lead weight in his coat pocket. He needed to do something about it. With every passing minute, he was losing time.
Inspiration struck, and Arnold turned his head from side to side, eyes searching. They settled upon what he was looking for, and Arnold allowed his face to split in an earnest smile. He motioned to the CD player with a nod. Shiny, plastic cases leaned around it like poorly constructed skyscrapers.
“Why don’t you put on some music while I freshen up our drinks?” he said and took Renee’s glass and his own back to the counter of the bar.
“Sure,” Renee said in the tonal equivalent of a shrug. If not for her eyes, she would have been as exciting as a warm glass of ginger ale and a C-Span 3 marathon.
Arnold waited until Renee’s back was turned-- apparently searching through the stacks of discs for the appropriate musical mood-- to slip a hand into his coat pocket. He pulled out the flask and voided the contents into Renee’s glass. He dipped his hand back into his coat and returned the flask to its hiding place. It had taken but a moment, all too easy.
As Arnold approached Renee from behind, he swirled her glass in one hand, mixing the drug and drink with a sadistic kind of arrogance.
“He makes it look easy,” his biographers would say.
“Nobody does it better,” they would say.
“Here you are, my dear,” Arnold said. Renee turned and took the glass.
Arnold swooned, consciousness fleeing him like a lemur off a cliff. The floor rushed up, and the world swirled, and a kind of dull, pulsing black void swallowed him whole.
***
The end there, the fainting part, that had all happened quite abruptly. As Arnold struggled up through the sluggish tar of unconsciousness, his confusion further complicated the progress towards rational thought. Everything had been going smashingly and then… well, and then… and then WHAT?
The question dogged him: What had happened?
With more effort than he ever expected to be necessary, Arnold peeled open his left eye.
Shadows surrounded him, and a dull throb emanated from his shoulder. He felt drowsy, drugged. Yes, drugged! His mind latched on to the word. He had been drugged. He pulled the word out of his mind like a concrete object, examined it, turned it over in his hand.
Memories like puzzle pieces jigsawed together: Arnold remembered the bourbon, remembered how Renee had distracted him to the dragon painting with her eyes. Realization hit. Of course. She must have used the moment to slip something into his drink. The deceptive wench!
Both of his eyes now open, it took some time for Arnold’s vision to adjust to the darkness. The first thing he noticed was his left arm stretched taut up and behind him, chained, a metal cuff around his wrist bolted to the wall. He blinked, uncertain that he was seeing what he was seeing, but the rusty chains and pale white flesh of hand remained. He wriggled his fingers, verifying they indeed belonged to him.
Arnold’s heart thumped in his chest as his pulse quickened. Who was Renee, and why was she doing this to him? Was she a friend of one of the girls he had killed? A family member looking to dish out her own source of justice?
Only one of his hands was cuffed. The other was free. Why would…
He caught a glimpse of Renee’s heels by his feet. As his eyes focused, he could see that above the heels were dainty ankles attached to legs. Her eyes closed, Renee lay sprawled on the floor. Vomited crusted her lips. More vomit, a chunky rainbow of bile and regurgitated lobster, had sprayed across the area near her mouth. A set of keys gleamed in the palm of Renee’s open hand.
Arnold paused, thinking, and then smiled. Renee must have drunk his knock-out concoction after he had passed out. Silly fool. Thinking she’d gotten the better of him, she must have dragged him down here to… where? The basement. But she’d only had just enough time to strap one of his hands to the wall before Arnold’s potion had worked its magic. Her body must have tried to reject it, and she’d choked to death on her own puke.
It still didn’t explain why Renee had brought him down here and chained him to the wall, but that didn’t make much of a difference at the moment.
Arnold stretched out his right leg towards Renee’s body. He could just reach the keys with the tip of his toes. He gritted his teeth. Strained. The keys tinkled as he toed them. He curled his shoe inward, and the keys slipped out of Renee’s motionless palm and clattered to the floor. When he got the keys close, he tried to reach down with his free hand and grab it. The chain shackled to his wrist yanked him back with a rough jerk.
Arnold groaned. He was going to have to do this the hard way. He held his right shoe steady with his left as he slipped out his foot. Then he used the same strategy to pull off his sock. The black sock was damp with sweat, and when it was off, his naked foot felt cold in the basement air. Arnold pinched the key ring between his big toe and his other little piggies and lifted it. He raised his foot just high enough to snatch the keys with his free hand.
“Yes!” he hissed.
A moment later, he found a key that fit, and the cuff sprang open with a click. Arnold rubbed his wrist and stepped away from the wall and over Renee’s body. Looking down at her, Arnold had an eerie feeling as if dozens of ants crept over his skin.
He imagined her eyes flying open and her hands closing over his ankles. He imagined her scream, and her nails digging furrows into his flesh until it bled. He imagined vomit erupting from her mouth and--
Something moved on the other side of the basement. In the shadows.
Arnold froze. Water dripped from the ceiling.
Plop.
Plop.
Plop.
An old leaky pipe. Other than that, nothing. No more furtive movement, just the rhythmic splash of sewage. After a pause, Arnold was sure that he must have imagined it.
Then it, whatever it was, gave a low, guttural moan. The “it” sounded human.
“Who’s there?” Arnold called. His heart thundered in his chest.
“He…” rasped a weak voice. “He…lp.”
“Who’s there?” he repeated.
“Help… m… meeeeeeee.”
The voice wasn’t much more than a cracked whisper, but it managed to raise the hairs on the back of Arnold’s neck. Considering that his own basement contained the stitched together parts of several dead women, it had been quite some time since he had experienced anything he might have considered relative to fear. All the same, Arnold felt this unwelcome sliver pierce his guts.
He took a few cautious steps towards the voice. His footsteps seemed to echo off the floor, louder when he stepped with his left foot because he’d forgotten to put the shoe back on his right. The voice had distracted him.
The first thing Arnold could make out was the glitter of two wide white eyes. They shone at him from the dark. The face around them appeared sickly and desperate. Long, greasy hair sagged in sweaty clumps, looping and ropy, miniature nooses around a skeletal face. It was a man or what was left of a man. Not much remained but skin hanging loosely from the bones. Metal rattled as the Arnold approached. The man had been chained to the wall.
As he overlooked the thing’s emaciated figure, Arnold couldn’t help but think, “This could have been me.”
He swallowed and felt a choking lump in his throat. Renee had done this. She was sick.
“Who are you?” Arnold croaked.
The man rasped, “Be…”
“Be? Ben? Is your name Ben?”
“Be… hi…”
“Be hi? Bee hive?”
“Be… hind! Behind… y… you!”
Realization flooded through Arnold like a lightening strike to the brain, and he turned and had just enough time to see Renee, up and very much alive, bringing the ax to bear.
“DIEEEEEEE!” Renee shrieked like a banshee. Her eyes were wild. Spittle flew from her lips. Her hair swirled in a tornado of fury. Her breath reeked of sour bile.
With a sharp cry, Arnold twisted away and felt the force of the ax whoosh past him and split the hanging man’s skull open like a ripe melon. A wet splatter of blood and flesh dotted Arnold’s face.
The lunatic groaned with disappointment. “Missed,” Renee said.
Arnold stumbled backwards, hit a table, and went over it, his legs flying from out under him. He did something of a flip, and for a moment, it was almost graceful, worthy of the ‘Escape a Deranged Killer Olympics’. Then the floor smacked him hard, and his breath rushed out of his lungs. The table flipped and crashed sideways, flinging an assortment of tools. Gasping for air, Arnold looked up at the Renee, at the hanging man, and at the ax.
Blood gushed from the man’s face and mouth. Renee sneered and tried to pull the ax out of the man’s head, but it was wedged deep. Her face was a mask of fresh blood. Her eyes were white wild orbs in a sea of crimson. Her blue irises blazed bright with insanity.
“I’m the Angel of Death!” she cried and yanked on the handle of the ax. It gave ever so subtly with a squish. Another pull and she would have it free. Arnold decided to not wait around that long.
Using the edge of the fallen table for support, Arnold pulled himself to his feet and ran. He heard a wet splat as Renee ripped the ax from the dead man’s skull.
Renee twittered, her words unintelligible. She gripped the handle of the ax with two white-knuckled hands. The blade dripped blood as it waved through the air.
Arnold couldn’t see any stairs. He swiveled his head back and forth, hoping to discover some route of escape. He couldn’t see much of anything. Stained sheets hung from the ceiling on lines of wires and obscured his view in a maze of old, rotting fabric. Arnold flung them away with shaking hands. He stumbled into them, through them, feeling the sheets brush his skin like cheap ghosts.
He heard fabric rip behind him. Renee was cutting her way through the sheet-maze with her ax.
“What did you slip into my drink, little man? It made me sleepy, so sleepy, but now I’m awake. I got yucky puke all over my pretty green blouse, but I’m awake. And now you’re going to get what you CAME HERE FOR!” Her voice echoed through the basement. Between the maze and the way Renee’s voice seemed to reflect off the walls, Arnold couldn’t be sure where she was.
He pushed another sheet out of his way and froze. His breath caught in his throat. Here, the maze dead-ended in three cement walls. Two were lined with shelves, and a variety of mason jars sat on the shelves. Within the jars, dark organs floated in milky liquid. Arnold recognized floating brains, floating lungs, floating kidneys, anything that had a name and could be cut out of a body floated somewhere in one of the jars.
On one wall, between the shelves, a sheet hung. Words had been painted across it. They read:
Find the demons. Cut them out.
Arnold swallowed. He remembered what Renee had called herself: “The Angel of Death.”
An operating table, or something that he assumed Renee must use as an operating table, lay before him. A body was splayed out on it, its chest cavity split open like a big hungry mouth.
Arnold felt numb as he walked towards the table. He examined everything with detached eyes. Reality didn’t exist. He walked in a dream, in Renee’s living nightmare. Arnold had never felt like this before, not even when he strangled Mary and watched her eyes roll up in her head and heard her last wracking breaths and then later when he preserved her body for longevity. Not even then.
Guts had been pulled out and recklessly flung about the room. Intestines trailed out of the cavity and looped to the floor like an overflowing plate of pork sausages. A scalpel had been driven into the man’s eye socket and stuck up.
Arnold licked his lips. The scalpel, yes, this was something he could use. He popped it out of the eye socket and pocketed it. Then his eyes roamed and found the… what was it called… bone saw? Deadly and silent, it waited on the table next to the dead man’s skull.
Something rustled from where he had come. Arnold turned.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Renee said, stepping from behind a long, blood-streaked sheet. She held the ax poised in her hands, ready.
“I’ve seen the evil in you,” Renee said. “And I’m going to cut it out.”
“All I want is your eyes,” Arnold replied. “That’s all I want.”
Renee approached, and Arnold took a step back. He bumped the table. His hands were at his sides; his fingers brushed the handle of the bone saw.
Arnold’s date raised the ax high above her head. Her eyes sparkled like blue sapphires. Gore was smeared along her face. Her gnashing teeth were pink with blood.
She said, “This is for your own good.”
She brought the ax down.
Arnold swung his arm out, bone saw in hand. The saw met flesh before the unwieldy ax, slicing through skin like a knife through melting ice cream. An arterial spray of blood splashed across Arnold’s face, blinding him, but the damage had been done. The ax faltered in its flight before falling from Renee’s grip and clanging harmlessly to the floor.
Renee’s hands went to her throat. It had become something of a fountain of pulsing blood. Wet runnels of dark red bubbled from between her clenching fingers. Her eyes went wide and accusing. And blue, oh so beautifully blue.
Arnold pulled the scalpel out of his pocket. It gleamed in the murky light of the overhead fluorescent. Arnold smiled, his lips peeling back over a set of crocodile teeth.
Renee’s mouth opened, and she gurgled. She staggered, fell to her knees.
“I told you,” Arnold said, “that all I wanted was your eyes.”
The nice thing about Renee’s throat being cut was that she could not scream.
***
The following day’s headline read: “LOCAL SERIAL KILLER BURNS IN HOME.”
Arnold could make it out over the shoulder of the lovely young woman with the paper in her hands. He allowed a slight smirk to curl his lips. He remembered how easily the house had burned, how many flammable chemicals had lined Renee’s shelves. All it had taken was a few broken jars and a single match.
Mary’s new eyes were so blue and so gorgeous that it had made it all worth it. But they made Arnold realize just how many improvements he could make. So many things about Mary were becoming less than perfect. More than one part of her was becoming… ripe.
“Horrible,” the young woman said when she noticed Arnold at her shoulder. It took Arnold a moment to realize that the woman had not read his thoughts but was referring to the newspaper in her hands.
“Quite horrible. It’s a wonder that people like that are out there,” Arnold said.
“Yes,” the woman replied and nodded.
Arnold looked at her, smiled, and said, “You have beautiful lips.”
