In Too Deep by Billy O'Callaghan Read Free Book Online Page B

than the practical duties of slicing food and use it to carve apart a throat of living, gasping, pulsing flesh. As much as anything, what sickened and terrified everyone who had stepped close to that scene was that he’d had the stomach to do this all so thoroughly. There were no signs of a struggle, and the wounds were clean. Nothing had been ripped, not so much as a single seam or button from the victim’s over-shirt.
    With a monster like this one – and monster was not overkill as a description, not in this case – there would always be another morning waiting just up ahead to mirror this, perhaps a week or a month or two months from now, and then after that one, another and another and another, and so on. A monster such as the man who’d done this got himself off on killing, on going out and wandering the streets in search of just the right pathetic little soul, that tiny sprout of a woman still young enough but just on the turn towards stale. He’d walk, studying the faces of the passers-by and even more carefully the faces of those people who had to huddle beneath bridges and in doorways and in the many other dark places of the city, because it paid high dividends to be meticulous about this selection. As with Melissa, he would probably look to pluck his next target from among the homeless or the prostitute class, but sooner or later he’d be sure to work up an appetite for better flesh, and the chances were only improving that number whatever next-in-line could be someone who actually counted for something, that or perhaps the wife of someone like that. So they’d take pains to look, the police would, and they’d keep on looking, following the muddy amber-lit bloodstains first through the snow and then the slush and then through whatever came after, the winds of spring and the baking days of summer. They’d keep on looking until they caught up with their prize, only it was a mistake to ever believe that they were bothering to look because of what had just happened to one worthless piece of street trash. The police had stood around, securing the area back from the doorway with yellow-and-black warning tape, preserving the scene, taking their evidence photographs and talking about how fucked-up all of this was, about how far beyond belief it was that anyone could even bring themselves to touch one of these people, never mind do something like this to them. There were some real sick bastards in the world and no mistake.
    The talk was not about Melissa, but about a slab of meat, something rank and odious and nothing at all like a child of God, not even related to the idea of a real person. And all of that unfolded while he stood there, watching and listening, in clear view but back a ways, in the mouth of a nearby alleyway, watching without being seen to watch, crying, but not in a way that anyone would bother to notice. The police saw evidence when they looked, Exhibit A, The Murder Victim; they saw arms and legs, tiny perished breasts coated with a crust of blood and dark staring eyes and a mouth open and clogged all the way to the back of the throat with gathered feathers of snow. What they missed and what they could never even imagine, was the notion of love attached to anyone like this. So they missed a lot.
    He stood there, watching and waiting for something to happen, crying to fill the time until dawn had properly broken, and after a while he realised that the tears had stopped, that he had cried himself out and his throat had begun to throb with thirst for something the right sort of hot to drink – wine that would burn all the way down and touch the parts that most needed touching – and he allowed himself one last look, hoping that this would not be how he’d remember her, but knowing that as a memory, a mental image, it would never be far from his conscious thoughts. Then he turned away and set himself to walking. Not in any hurry, because there was no place