Chris Carter - I Am Death

‘C’mon, eat up, Squirm, before I change my mind.’

The boy still didn’t move.

‘The Monster’ sat back, brought a hand to his face and began to gently run the tips of his fingers against his lips.

‘I saw you eyeing up the newspaper,’ he said. There was no anger in his voice. ‘You want to read it?’

This dream is just getting more and more bizarre. What next? He’s going to offer to drive me home? But then, a new thought entered the boy’s mind. Pain. Back in his cell, when the man grabbed him by his hair, he’d felt pain — unbearable pain. You’re not supposed to feel pain in a dream, despite how real it might seem. He had read that once. So is this craziness real?

‘This is all real, Squirm,’ ‘The Monster’ said, as if he had the power to read the boy’s thoughts. He indicated with his hands as he spoke. ‘The food is real, this house is real, these walls are real, those shackles are real, your cell is real and I am real. This is really happening to you. Your life isn’t yours anymore. It belongs to me and I can do whatever I like with it.’

Squirm’s good eye glanced around the room, as if he were unable to find something to focus on. Finally, it returned to the newspaper.

‘I know why you want to read it,’ ‘The Monster’ said. ‘You’re curious to find out about the investigation, aren’t you?’ He paused for effect and to study the boy one more time. ‘You can read it if you like. It makes no difference to me.’

As ‘The Monster’ mentioned the investigation, Squirm could sense his breathing picking up speed. He was sure that the police were looking for him. They had to be. He’d been missing for days now, he just didn’t know exactly how many. Despite his tumultuous relationship with his father, they were still family and deep inside they still cared for each other. When Squirm hadn’t come back home that day, his father would’ve contacted the school, then the authorities, there was no doubt about that. Yes, he was sure that the police were looking for him, but while at first that thought at least gave him some hope, it now gave him none. If they hadn’t found him after so many days, he knew that police efforts would be reduced; after that, the search would lose momentum; and soon, if it hadn’t already happened, he would be relegated to just another cold case. Another missing kid who was never found. Another missing persons casualty.

Squirm looked back at ‘The Monster’.

That’s why you want me to read the paper, isn’t it? the boy thought. Because there’s something in there saying that the police have called off the search, isn’t there? I’m already just a casualty. Just another statistic. No one is coming to help me. Not anymore. You want me to know that, don’t you?

Squirm felt his heart fold inside his chest.

‘C’mon.’ The man pointed to one of the other three chairs around the table. ‘Sit. Eat. Today you don’t have to eat it from the floor.’

Still Squirm didn’t move. Was this a trick? Was that monster enticing him to move only so he could beat him up some more?

That made no sense, because that monster didn’t need an excuse to beat him up. He did it whenever he pleased.

So what the hell is this?

‘The food isn’t poisoned either,’ the man announced, once again guessing the boy’s thoughts. And he’d guessed it right. ‘Here. Look.’ He reached for his plastic fork, scooped up some scrambled eggs from the plate and ate it, this time without making a single appreciative sound.

Squirm watched in silence.

Suddenly the man’s expression went somber, before his eyes widened in terror. He dropped the fork and, with both hands, reached for his throat. His panicked gaze moved to the boy, who was now watching everything with a totally confused look on his face.

‘Hellllp.’ The man’s voice came out strangled. Desperate. His face reddened.

Out of pure instinct, Squirm took one step forward, then stopped.

What the hell is happening?

‘Arghhh... ’

Fuck you, you sick piece of shit.

‘Arghhh... ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.’ The man let go of his throat and began laughing like a kid who had just been told the best joke in the world.

‘Did you really think that the food was poisoned, Squirm? What the fuck? Why? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. If I wanted to kill you, why would I poison the food? That’s no fun.’ The play left the man’s voice, replaced by a dead serious tone. ‘The fun comes from getting your hands dirty, Squirm. From feeling the warmth of blood against your skin. From punishing them. You in sync with their breathing as they’re dying, and you taking every breath with them. Until the very last one. Until they breathe no more.’ ‘The Monster’ laughed again. ‘You should’ve seen your face. Shocked and happy at the same time.’ He shook his head. ‘Sorry, Squirm. The only way you’ll get rid of me is if I get rid of you. Besides that, your worthless little life belongs to me.’

Squirm felt like he had fallen down the rabbit hole. That he had somehow transcended worlds.

‘No, you’re not hallucinating,’ the man replied.

Without noticing it, Squirm had asked the question out loud.

‘I know that you’re wondering what the hell is happening here. Why am I giving you my food without having touched it? Why haven’t I thrown it on the floor for you to eat it? Why am I being so... ’ ‘The Monster’ searched the air for the word. ‘Nice.’ The man turned his palms toward him, folded his fingers in and checked his nails. ‘And trust me, this is the nicest I’ll ever be.’ He looked at the boy again. ‘You want to know why, don’t you?’

No reply. No movement.

‘Don’t you, Squirm?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘OK then.’ He tapped the tabletop twice with his right hand. ‘Sit down. Eat your food. And I’ll tell you.’

The file that Detective Sanders handed Hunter opened with a black and white portrait photograph of a man who looked to be in his mid to late thirties. He was an interesting-looking man. His head was clean-shaven, his face round and unremarkable, with a small nose and thin lips, but his light-blue eyes carried an intensity in them that was almost hypnotic. They seemed to be full of intelligence and pain at the same time.

The first thought that came into Hunter’s mind as he studied the photograph was that whoever this man was, with the exception of his eyes he had the sort of simple, featureless face that would take to disguising like a cat to free food. The sort of face that would easily blend into a crowd and then disappear.

‘Detectives,’ Sanders finally said. ‘Meet Mathew Hade.’

‘OK, and who is he?’ Garcia asked.

‘Well, following Detective Hunter’s guidelines, I initialized a search against the national Missing Persons database for a list of cases where an abduction was perpetrated under similar circumstances to Nicole Wilson’s; for example, from inside a house, or where the abduction scene was relatively clean, and so on. I restricted the search to LA only, going back a maximum of twenty years.’ Sanders shook his head. ‘That gave me no results really worth looking into. I sent Robert an email telling him that the search hit a blank and he asked me to try it again, this time expanding the search to the whole of California. That gave me four different cases.’

Garcia finally moved his gaze from Hade’s picture back to Detective Sanders.

‘The scenes in those cases were nowhere near as clean as Ms. Wilson’s one,’ Sanders explained. ‘But they were interesting enough. The problem was, two out of the four perpetrators were dead, and the other two are serving life sentences with no possibility of parole. I emailed the results to Robert and he asked me to run one last search.’