Page 7 of Unlikable

“In London, they do make sense.” With mixed feelings, he throws the newspaper in the corner of the room, with the remains of his evening meal, which had not been tasty at all. Lukewarm pea soup, a handful of nuts and two small, uncooked potatoes. It was the only food he had managed to find. Leftovers from the owner of the property below him. He had forced himself to eat some of everything, but after a few bites, vomiting was closer to him than hunger.

In the other corner of the room is a chair; one of its back legs had broken off, leaving the person strapped to it struggling to keep the chair balanced.

The young woman was making too much noise, so he had stuffed a dirty piece of cloth into a ball and then pushed it into her mouth. She still makes noise, but not loud enough anymore to alarm the resident below him…Just as well, because below him lives a butcher with a very large and sharp knife.

“No worries,” he says, ignoring her moans. “It won’t take long. The mixture is almost ready.”

The woman starts crying.

The sobs bring a smile to his face.

With quick steps, he walks through the small room, dodging the shelves that creak. He starts gathering the ingredients. He knows how to make this remedy; he has done nothing else for the last few months. Done nothing else for the last few years. It took him a ridiculous amount of effort to find the right combination, but after years of experimenting, making his first victims, he succeeded. His first victims did not die from the final drug but from his experiments. A complication he took for granted because without trial experiments, he would never have arrived at this final result.

And now that final result has to be changed, distorted into a new tool he can use.

The woman groans again and starts moving up and down uncontrollably, causing the legs of the chair to start scratching the floor, much to his annoyance.

“If you don’t stop, I will make sure your death will be slow and painful,” he snarls, without looking at her.

The woman stops immediately.

He resumes his work. The liquids are so potent that they seem to give off light. He adds the poison-green liquid last. “Though I can’t promise you this won’t be slow and painful,” he murmurs so softly that only he can hear. He shakes the drug gently back and forth, watching the substances blend together.

Then it’s done.

But instead of administering the drug with a syringe, he pours it into a small metal cup with extreme care. He does it as carefully as a man holding his own baby for the first time.

“You know,” he starts with extreme mirth in his voice, something that makes the woman in the chair start to sweat and whimper even more. “If London hadn’t been so smart, I would never have had to do this. Maybe I would have let you go.”

He turns to her, holding the cup like a trophy in his right hand. “But this is what I wanted. I wanted to be opposed a bit more. It’s been monotonous for too long, not exciting enough.”

The woman looks at him with large, tearful eyes. Her gaze falls on the cup in his hand, and then she starts squeaking anxiously, like a mouse that has fallen into a trap.

With slow steps, he walks towards her. “And now it’s finally here. I have a game to play. A game I am going to win, only first I have to test whether I am going to enter the battlefield with the right tools. If the city is going to protect itself with collars, scarves and other things, then I have to think of a new way to strike.” He comes to a halt a few inches away from the woman and looks down at her with a smile. The smile could almost be called loving. “So, dear young lady, it is up to you to test whether Unlikable is as effective from a cup as it is from a needle.”

With a jerk, he pulls the wad of fabric out of her mouth. The woman immediately starts screaming, but he was prepared for that. He puts his free hand over her nose and lips. He waits until her breathing slows down and her screams stop. When she almost loses consciousness, he withdraws his hand again.

She looks at him wearily.

“Make one more sound, and I’ll…” He clicks his tongue thoughtfully. “Just don’t make any more sound at all. For I am a man of great patience, but when my patience runs out, you will wish you had never been born.”

She is silent and turns her sweaty head away from him.

“Good,” he says. Then he grabs her by the cheeks with two fingers and squeezes, causing her lips to part. Immediately, he pours the drug inside. The woman sputters against it, but he squeezes her jaw shut. He thinks he sees her biting her tongue, but then she should not have resisted him so much. To make her swallow the drug, he drops the empty cup in her lap and pinches her nose with his other, now free, hand.

The woman swallows.

And he waits.

He keeps track of time with a pocket watch he stole from the house below him. Immediately after taking the drug, the woman stops making noise. All she does is cry softly.

A total of forty-five minutes pass before the first symptoms become visible. Her black hair is no longer black but is slowly turning grey. Her eyes lose their youthful sparkle. The first wrinkles appear on her face, on her hands, on her neck.

“This is great,” he says with amazement in his voice. As if he cannot believe that his remedy has become even more effective, does its work even faster.

And then he does something the woman does not expect. He walks back to the table where the rest of the remedy is, pours himself a cup and drinks it. Then he sits down opposite her so he can continue to study her, keep an eye on what the remedy will do next.

She stares at him, not understanding why he drank his own medicine.

But as he expected, it does nothing for him. Out of boredom, he picks up Frankenstein from the floor next to him and starts reading in it. Because he knows every line, knows how to name every word and letter, the book reassures him. It is his anchor. A promise that he is not alone in his way of thinking. That there are others like him on earth. At least, in the fictional world, but that doesn’t matter. A fictional world is also a world.

After forty-five minutes, he is still himself and the woman, no matter how beautiful and how young she once was, has turned into something even the devil would run from.

“What will happen to me now?” she asks in a cracking voice as he gets up from the ground to write down his results in a logbook. “Am I going to die?”

“Not from one dose,” he responds matter-of-factly, as he enthusiastically starts making notes on paper with kohl. “Only if I give you a second dose will the drug finish its work.” He slams the logbook shut and turns to her. “The needles sometimes contained a double dose, sometimes a single one. If I am instantly fed up with someone, I give that person a double dose. If I am curious about how a person will beg for help, I give one. You should have seen them, all those poor souls who got just one dose. They all came back. Crawling on the floor, begging for redemption.”

“And did you give them that redemption?”

“Always.” He grins and closes his eyes to recall fond memories.

“Will you give me that redemption?” she asks softly.

He opens his eyes again and shakes his head. “Not yet. The drug still needs to be refined. Do its job faster.”

She does not respond.

“I’m going to administer a drug that will make you feel like yourself again. Don’t you like that?”

Hope breaks through on her face.

“And then I’ll keep experimenting on you until I get the right result.”

The woman lets out a sob.

“Shh,” he says comfortingly and walks towards her again, putting his hands on her now brittle knees and catching her gaze. “No worries. I have the gift of reading results quickly. I only need one night to know if my remedy can work for days or weeks. I am an intelligent man.”

“Deliver me, please,” she begs.

He would almost feel sorry for her if he hadn’t seen the disgust in her eyes the first time she looked at him, earlier this evening. The disgust he sees in everyone’s eyes. By now recognisable, predictable, but no less painful.

With a sigh, he gets up, walks to the table, grabs a knife and makes a cut in his palm. Then he walks back to the woman, opens her mouth—which is effortless now because apparently she is done fighting or too weakened to resist—and lets her drink his blood.

Immediately, her hair regains the same shine and colour as before. Life returns to her eyes, and her face takes on the rosy colour of youthfulness.

“I’ll deliver you,” he promises and withdraws his hand. “But first we finish what we started.”