Chris Carter - An Evil Mind

He took it from her trembling hands, pressed down on the cap and twisted it counterclockwise, before pouring two of the pills onto her hand. She placed them in her mouth and swallowed them down without even sipping the water. Her eyes pleaded for more.

‘I read the label, Mom. It says you shouldn’t have more than eight a day. The two you just had make it ten today.’

‘You’re so intelligent, my darling.’ She smiled again. ‘You’re very special. I love you so much and I’m so sorry I won’t see you grow up.’

His eyes filled with tears once again as she wrapped her bony fingers around the medicine bottle.

He held on to it tightly.

‘It’s OK,’ she whispered. ‘It’ll all be OK now.’

Hesitantly, he let go. ‘Dad will be angry with me.’

‘No, he won’t be, baby. I promise you.’ She placed two more pills in her mouth.

‘I brought you these biscuits.’ He pointed to the tray. ‘They’re your favorite, Mom. Please have one. You didn’t eat much today.’

‘I will, honey, in a while.’ She had a few more pills. ‘When Daddy comes home in the morning, tell him I love him, and that I always will. Can you do that for me?’

The boy nodded. His eyes locked on the now almost empty medicine bottle.

‘Why don’t you go read one of your books, darling? I know you love reading.’

‘I can read in here, Mom, so you’re not alone. I can sit in the corner if you like. I won’t make a noise, I promise.’

She extended her hand and touched his hair. ‘I’ll be OK now, honey. The pain’s starting to go away.’ Her eyelids looked heavy.

‘I’ll guard the room then. I’ll sit just outside the door.’

She smiled a pain-stricken smile. ‘Why do you wanna guard the room, honey?’

‘You told me that sometimes God comes and takes ill people to heaven. I don’t want him to take you, Mom. I’ll sit by the door and if he comes I’ll tell him to go away. I’ll tell him that you’re getting better and not to take you.’

‘You’ll tell God to go away?’

He nodded vigorously.

She started crying again. ‘I’m going to miss you so much, Robert.’

Taylor looked at Hunter and felt her heart shrivel inside her chest.

A cold smile began to crack on Lucien’s lips, like ice over a dark, frozen lake. ‘So you left the room,’ he said.

Hunter nodded.

‘And that was when the nightmares started,’ Lucien said in conclusion, like a psychologist who had finally broken through a patient’s barrier.

A disconcerting silence took over the entire basement corridor, but not for long. With his gaze fixed on Lucien, Hunter finally let go of the memory.

‘Susan, Lucien,’ he said. The sadness had vanished from his voice. ‘You have what you wanted, now tell us what happened after you drugged her in the car?’

La Honda, 18 miles from Palo Alto, California.

Twenty-five years earlier.

Susan Richards was jolted awake by the loud sound of a heavy door slamming shut. Despite the sudden noise, her eyes opened slowly, blinking constantly, as if grains of sand had been blown into them and were now scratching at her cornea. Her eyelids felt heavy and tired, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get her eyes to focus on anything. Everything around her came as nothing but a big blur.

The first thing she realized was how dizzy she felt, as if she were stuck in a hazy dream with no way of waking up. Her mouth was bone dry and her tongue felt like sandpaper. Then she noticed the smell — dirty, damp, moldy, old and sickening. She had no idea where she was, but it smelt as if the place had been neglected for years. In spite of the horrible stench, Susan’s lungs demanded that she took in a full breath of air, and as she did, she could almost taste the rancid quality of the room. One deep breath and it made her gag.

All of a sudden, between desperate coughs, sharp and excruciating pain came to her. It took her exhausted body a few seconds to finally home in on it. It was coming from her right arm.

Susan realized then that she was sitting down on some sort of hard and terribly uncomfortable chair. Her wrists were tied together behind the chair’s backrest, her ankles to the chair’s legs. She was soaking wet, drenched with sweat. She tried lifting her head, which was awkwardly slumped forward, and the movement sent waves of nausea rippling through her stomach.

She couldn’t identify the light source inside the room, maybe a corner lamp or an old light bulb hanging overhead, but whatever it was, it bathed the room in a weak yellowish glow. Her eyes finally moved right and tried to focus on her arm and the source of the pain. She still felt groggy, so it took a moment for her vision to steady itself and for the blurriness to dissipate. When it did, her heart was filled with terror.

‘Oh, my God.’ The words dribbled out of her lips.

An enormous chunk of skin was missing from her arm — from her shoulder all the way down to her elbow. In its place she saw raw, blood-soaked flesh. For an instant, it looked as if the wound were alive. Blood was cascading down her arm, over her hands, through her fingers, and onto the concrete floor, forming a large crimson pool at the feet of the chair.

Instantly, Susan jerked her head away and vomited all over her lap. The effort made her feel even weaker, even dizzier.

‘Sorry about that, Susan,’ she heard a familiar voice say. ‘You could never really stand the sight of blood, could you?’ Susan coughed a few more times and tried to spit the awful vomit taste from her mouth. Her eyes moved forward, finally focusing on the figure standing in front of her.

‘Lucien. .’ she said in a feeble whisper.

Flash images of last night at the Rocker Club came back to her. Then she remembered sitting in Lucien’s car. . the angry way he had looked at her. And then nothing.

‘What. .’ She was unable to finish the sentence, her throat way too frail to produce the sounds. Instinctively, her eyes shot toward the raw flesh in her right arm once again and her whole body shivered.

‘Oh,’ Lucien said, unconcerned, reaching behind him. ‘Don’t worry about that. I don’t think you’ll miss this horrible thing, will you?’

He showed her a large glass jar filled with some pale pink liquid. Something was floating in it. Susan squinted, forcing her tired eyes, but still couldn’t tell what it was.

‘Oh, sorry,’ Lucien said, picking up on her confusion and reaching inside the jar with his gloved hand to collect the floating object. ‘Allow me to show you. The edges have curled in a little bit now.’ He uncurled them and stretched the wet piece of skin he had carved off her arm less than an hour ago. ‘This is a hideous tattoo, Susan. I have no idea why you’d think that this is cool in any way.’

Acid-tasting bile found its way back into Susan’s mouth, resulting in a new desperate gagging/coughing frenzy.

Amused, Lucien waited until it was over.

‘But I think that it will make a great token,’ he said, nodding a couple of times. ‘And do you know what? I do think that I will give the “token collector” thing a shot. See how it makes me feel. Test the theory behind it. What do you think?’

Susan’s head throbbed with the rhythm of her thudding heart. The rope that had been used to tie her wrists and ankles felt as if it had cut through to her bones. She wanted to speak, but fear seemed to have erased every word from her terrified mind. Her eyes, on the other hand, mirrored her fear and desperation.

Lucien returned the tattooed piece of skin to the jar.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve had that syringe hidden in my car for almost a year now. I thought about using it many times.’