*Mild drug references. Don't be alarmed. I guessed.*
Chapter 3
I awake at 7:30 the next morning, the time that I have accustomed myself to wake at each day. Blinking faintly once or twice, I believe that I can hear a voice quietly calling my name.
Master.
I rise from the bed, easily making my way to the door. The daylight streaming into the hallway guides my eyes into the lair, still dark as it always is. I hear a few clicks of keys, the small burst of air that whisks through Master’s fingers as he opens something on the screen in front of him.
It’s a picture of a younger man of moderate height, no older than his thirties. He’s smiling and happy in the photo, wearing a suit jacket and red tie, as though he is at some sort of mixer. His thick blonde hair falls over his eyebrows and almost into his pale blue eyes.
“Is he to die today?” I ask, sure of the answer.
“Indeed, he is. Winston Toll. He’ll be in the Mercola alleyway in an hour.”
I nod instantly and go to retrieve a knife from our stockpile.
“But...” Master warns me. “I’ve received word that he looks just a tad different. Some life events, per say, have transmuted him.”
“Thank you, Master.” I say, returning to the room with a slightly used silver knife in hand. I bow my head to his shoes quickly, picking just a droplet of blood off the blade with my fingernails as I exit into the streets.
As I walk down the suburban roads, knife safely hidden under my cardigan, I glance at my surroundings. The one-story brick homes, the white picket fences, the stick-thin trees struggling to stay planted in every lawn...it all rings a familiar tone in my head.
Then, I remember all too suddenly. Mercola was the streets of my youth.
I can just remember the night, fourteen years ago, clear as a museum-polished diamond. They were screaming at eachother, something silly about my father forgetting to go somewhere important. Neither of them knew that my little fingers wrapped around the doorway, vibrant eyes wide with shock and tears as I watched.
“You’re a wretched, no-good bastard!” I remember hearing my mother yell, pain cracking her voice as she did. “All I’ve ever had to deal with is your ignorance and inability to give a damn about anything that breathes other than yourself!”
“That’s not true!” He responded gruffly, shaking to keep his tears locked in his eyes. “I do my best for Thaila, and you know it!”
“Never a damn thing, never a damn thing!” She repeated over and over, countless times.
Those are the only words I recall. I remember violence ensuing the screams. It was enough for me to race my three-year-old bare feet down the street yelling, “Help! Momma! Daddy! Save them, anyone!”
I was desperate for someone to stop the madness. It was then that I ran into a young boy, no more than fifteen, in a large hood walking the streets. He asked me what the matter was, told me to wait there, and faded into the darkness. He didn’t come back to that spot before the police officers found me, scooped me unwillingly into their arms, and carried me back to the house that I had ran so far to get away from.
By then, it seemed like there were thousands of flashing lights, all red and blue, some white, all blinding. I could just see the face of our neighbor in the window, stern and waiting for something excellent to happen.
I am instantly broken out of my trance by a low, raspy voice saying, “Ah, thank ya, sir!” Looking to my left, I see a man dressed in a torn black ensemble of clothing, limping away from a man in a cloak who whisks away so quickly that I can’t decipher his looks.
The man in black continues limping for a few seconds, throws himself down on the asphalt of the alleyway, and takes a minuscule, clear plastic bag containing several grams of a white substance out of his coat pocket.
I can’t help but roll my eyes at the desperate scene. Clearly, Master hadn’t been deceiving when he said that Winston Toll’s appearance had change. He is a ravaging drug addict.
Quickly, he dips a paper into the bag, dusting it with power, lifts it to his tongue, and lets it dissolve there. A smile begins to spread across his disheveled face as his fast-moving eyes catch mine.
“Ay!” He says in a choppy, slurring voice. “Don’t I know ya from somewhere? Your eyes are singing...singing like a birdie to me.”
I’m a bit frightened, but I have to remind myself that he’s only seeing things. My eyes may have turned into a bird for all I know.
“Never seen you before.” I say sternly, approaching him slowly.
“You sure? I can remember it, that night! The screaming, oh, the screaming. I called on ‘em, I did. There was blood, everywhere.”
These things that he speaks of send a chill running down my spine, for a reason unknown to me. Wrapping my fingers tighter around the blade of the knife, I take a few more steps.
“I can remember it! Ay, how they was fighting! Their little daughter had gone done and run away, down that street screaming.”
I’m petrified now. He seems to know exactly what the story of my parents fight is, detail for blurry detail, not losing much of it to his hazy mind.
“You don’t know me, street trash.” I hiss through closed teeth, struggling to keep myself from shaking.
“Purple eyes...I know you well, sweetheart.” He smirks, showing his grimy teeth.
I close my eyes, bite down on my lip, and switch the knife through the air faster than I knew my hand could move. A breathless gasp, a thud, and I open my eyes to see Winston Toll, throat slit, a slow line of blood trickling onto the ground from it.
Breathless and panicking, I flee the scene, keeping my teeth tightly on my lip to hold everything inside. Somehow, I feel that Winston wasn’t just hallucinating that little story.
‘Don’t I know you’ is what he said,
sending panic through my head.
Not a soul here knows my story,
tale that ends in death so gory
of the two I loved the most.
Now, to horror, I play host.
You don’t know me, sir dead man.
Yet, from your still body, I ran.
‘Don’t I know you’ is what he said,
sending panic through my head.
Chapter 4
By the time I’ve reached the metallic doorway that leads into the lair, I’ve calmed down a bit. Inhaling a long, slow breath, I open the door and step into darkness. Repeating the procedure, I drop the knife to tell Master of my presence.
“I can ensure you, Master, it was a very simple kill.”
“Excellent.” He says with his smiling tone, quickly marking Winston’s happy picture with a “TERMINATED” stamp and chuckling lowly.
I nod to him, as usual, and scramble my way up to the roof to ponder my experiences. Winston Toll...a now lamented drug addict...knew my story. Whether or not it was a figment of his destroyed mind, I do not know. It’s enough to make my eyes, eyes that have seen many a soul die without remorse, shed a tear or two.
No, no, I tell myself. You don’t cry. Not since the hospital.
Oh, the hospital. It was the night of the fight, after the lights showed at our house, and I knew my parents were inside the hospital room, fading with their jagged breaths. I could hear beeping, relentless beeping, tracking their slow heartbeats as I sat, knees drawn to my face in the corner of the room.
“What does it look like to you?” A soft-voiced nurse whispered.
“I can’t say for certain...but I think they may have killed eachother.” A young doctor responded to her, eyes laden with fake sadness.
I remember not being able to handle the intensity. I left the room, ran outside breathing in short, childish gasps, and found myself keeling on the dark side of the building in grass, staring at the moon and the starless sky. It was then that I heard light footsteps and brown leather dress shoes came into my vision.
“I told you I’d come back, didn’t I, sweetheart? I tried my best to help you.”
It was the boy, the boy in the hood. He came back for me. I could only sniffle and nod in his presence, so mysterious and great to my youthful mind.
“Are they gone? Perished, I mean?” He asked.
I nodded again, trembling.
“I’ll tell you what...tomorrow afternoon, I’ll come and get you, get you forever. We’ll do wonders, sweetheart. I can just feel it.”
I hadn’t the faintest idea of what it meant, but I nodded yet a third time as he tucked his hands into his hood pockets and dashed away into the trees nearby. The following day, he snuck into the hospital lobby, though I don’t know quite how he did, and led me away into a small, nearly torn-down shack in a field on the edges of town.
“It’s not much, but one day, it’ll be much more extravagant. It’ll fit our needs. After all, you’re perfect for it.”
What ‘it’ was, I didn’t know for years and years. For a long time, we simply lived, him building his contraptions and lairs into the crafts they are today, and me watching his shadowed figure, helping to hold a wire in place when I could. Around the year I turned ten, he took me into the finished lair and whispered, “Show me your perfection.”
It was then that he trained me how to kill for him. I learned everything I now know as he continued to push me forward, calling me perfect all along the way.
I stop and ponder this for a minute. Perfect. He called me perfect. I wonder, if I knew his true face, all the eccentricities of his true personality, and if he was young and sweet, if I would be in love with him.
Humorous, really, when I think of it. I doubt I could love a soul after so many have choked at my hands.
I wonder if I’d love you
if I knew your darkened soul.
But I have lost all emotion, see.
Oh, murder takes its toll.
Toll...Toll...Winston Toll....
