Page 20 of If Looks Could Kill

He wakes from his stupor in the squalid little room. A few embers glow upon the grate, and the candle still burns down slowly, but it’s much shorter than before. How much time has passed?

He can’t move. He lies on the floor upon his side. It feels as if his arms and legs are trussed up with cords. He strains against what binds him, but his body won’t obey his will.

Until, at length, fingertips begin to curl. Eyelids blink. One boot scuffs along the floor. Dulled nerves awaken to the electric shock of survival. He raises leaden hands before his face.

No ropes. Only paralysis fading away.

The bells toll four. The night, still black as pitch. He rises to his feet.

There, on the bed, rumpled and peaceful, is the soft, sleeping form of the red-haired girl. Like a painting. Like an angel. Like a lie.

She did this to him. All of it.

Beside her on the bed is a small diary. He thumbs to its most recent entry. Scrawled in pencil are just three words: I killed him.

So that’s why she’s still here, asleep. She thinks she ended Jack the Ripper tonight.

He tosses the diary into the fire. It sits a quiet moment upon the embers, then lights up with newly hungry flame.

She and her kind, her whole sex, deserve disembowelment. Not merely to die, but to die with their vile and vulgar hideousness laid bare.

She is asleep. One swift stroke and his work will be done, his victory assured. Her lidded eyes will lose whatever power they had to transfix and suffocate him.

One quick slice from ear to ear.

He is an expert at it now. At speed, at stealth, at silencing his prey.

Then why is he afraid?

He flexes and tenses like a Thoroughbred champing at the starting gate.

He springs.

Just, just as the blade breaks through, the eyes fly open.

“Oh! Murder!” she cries with her last gasp of breath, but her eyes are laughing, laughing, her face smiling tauntingly at him, even as he hacks away at his gruesome task, it smiles, it laughs, it lives .

The head lives. All but severed, the heart’s blood pouring, yet still it lives, and still those eyes burn, the tongue flickers, all the tongues flicker and hiss with hatred and cruel, cruel laughter, and he is frozen and stunned once again, passing into the void as vision closes around him with its tunnel of sight narrowing around her laughing, laughing face.

He will destroy that face.

When he returns once again from her final spell and she is cold and dead, he will take his time dismantling that face and all that belongs to it, so that no one can ever fall prey to the evil inside this demon girl.

No murder, this; this killing is hero’s work.

For the good of the tribe. For the peace of Christendom.

A labor to be sung in ages to come. Monster-slaying.

But then again, they all were.