Duncan's Diary by Christopher C. Payne Read Free Book Online

and went immediately to the refrigerator for a beer. A nice cold Stella always hits the spot no matter what frame of mind you are in. I chugged down a nice big gulp, stretched, and went to survey the house with new motives.
    I walked down from the apartment. It ends at a wall, and you can either turn left or right. Turning right leads to a short hall that opens up to the renter’s area with the pool table room on your left and the TV room on your right. Turning left takes you either down more stairs to the garage or up a few stairs to the kids’ room. It was the kids’ room that I felt held the most promise. I would need access from the garage and access to water that was close from the bathroom. The ability to section it off in a non-obtrusive way would prove to be more difficult.
    As I sat there in a chair five sizes too small for my frame, drinking my ice-cold Stella I waited for an epiphany. It came quicker than I would have imagined. The room was about 18 feet x 45 feet – it was a very large room. When you walked up the stairs you came to a cupboard on your right with a shelf about waist high. The shelf held a dollhouse and other miscellaneous toys on top. As you walked ahead, there were three stairs leading into a pass-through bedroom that, then, led to the rest of the rental portion of the house. The room continued past the three stairs and contained two bunk beds (full on bottom and twin on top and a futon that was folded most of the time into a couch). At that end of the bedroom was a window seat, spanning the full width of the room. Everything was directly above the garage.
    I could section off the portion that contained the dollhouse, wrap the stairs from the garage upward, have a door leading into my section of the house, and let the hallway move forward into the bedroom. This would require the slightest structural changes to the house, and could be explained away by changing a portion of the apartment, as well. I could simply add on some of the space to the apartment. Keeping most of the area for a hidden room would be easy. It is not like anyone ever measured the dimensions.
    I now had a plan for my personal playground. Since the main house was not rented, I went down to the TV room, flipped it on, and started a fire. That room contained an old-fashioned wood-burning stove, which was used for heating, not aesthetics. It was made from solid iron and had a large handled door on the front that once shut increased the heat in the stove to unbelievable levels. The stove could heat the entire house when it was stoked to full capacity. This meant the TV room became unbearably hot as the heat sifted through to the rest of the house. My second epiphany was disposal. I was sure that this stove could faithfully rise to a level that would allow me to disintegrate bones. Why not put it to the test?
    I ran back up the stairs, grabbed a couple of my dog’s thoroughly used and completely chewed beef bones, and threw them in the fire as it was reaching full capacity. My job now was to sit back and watch a DVD entitled Hostel II . It was about the ability to pay for the pleasure of killing people in a small village in Europe. How ironic.
    As the movie ended—and three beers into my evening—I decided that the fire idea would work (the bones were about 30 percent gone). It would take a long time, and I would have to be very diligent in my burning efforts, but that was a small price to pay. This meant that I would not be able to have mass amounts of people flow through my new procedure. I would have to take my time on the experimentation and fun and, then, slowly dispose of the remains.
    I spent the next four weekends, taking an extra Friday when possible, working on the project. It was slow going at first, but went relatively quickly after the structural portion of the renovation was underway. I put four layers of soundproof drywall and insulation into the walls, floor, and ceiling. This cut into my space of the room, but I