Paul Cleave - The Laughterhouse

Fifteen years ago becoming a killer felt good. Tonight he felt nothing. There was the excitement and the nerves driving there, but then-nothing. For years he’s been dreaming about these moments, thinking all that blood would help bring back some of what he’s lost, but it turns out he was wrong. He stood in that first old man’s house and felt dead inside, even after the blade had done its work. The second house was the same. This wasn’t about revenge, it wasn’t about emotion, it was about punishment.

Yet he’d done so much cutting. In those moments he had lost himself, the rage and pain of fifteen years had emerged, taking control of him, and he can remember the first stab but not the others. It wasn’t until he found himself staring down at the bodies, blood dripping from his face, that he tried to recall, just how long had he been there? How many times had his arm swung up and down? The dead man in front of him told him it was a lot. He thought then the humanity would arrive, that it would be late to the party and it would come along and cripple him. It stayed away. It didn’t even knock on the door.

These people all must pay for their mistakes, just as he has paid for his. The two tonight, it took some memory jogging on their parts to remember him. The others will remember better. The others are all younger. The police, of course, will make the connection. But he’s chosen the order carefully, and by the time they make it the night will be over and it will be too late.

He steps out of the shower. The bathroom mirror is fogged over, and that’s fine-he doesn’t want to see himself. His reflection is too painful to look at. He dries himself down and heads into the bedroom and gets dressed. Then he plays with his cell phone. He uses it to open a news website, and so far there is no mention of the two dead men.

The phone switches off to a lock screen, and he has to slide his finger across it to bring it back to life. He’d never held a phone like this before. Years ago they were much bigger, a lot heavier, and if you didn’t look at the screen from the right angle you couldn’t see a damn thing. Now they’re as thin as his finger and about the same weight, and you can do anything with them. The human race seems to be only a few years away from living like Captain Kirk.

It’s creeping up toward quarter to ten. He grabs his keys, his jacket, his knife, and the flowers he bought earlier. He pauses in the doorway and glances at the apartment for only a few seconds. It’s the last time he will ever see it. It was never a home. He won’t miss it.

The City of Christchurch even at night looks the same after all these years, but it feels different. He read the news when he could-he knew the crime rate was escalating-but now he can feel it. The people in this city have changed. There are more people with shaved heads and tattoos, and people spit as they walk and bump into other and start arguments. Many drive fast cars with loud engines. It’s been a long time, but back when he was a member of this world the cars were different but the status they stood for was the same, all men with big egos and small dicks, and he suspects it’s the same now. The teenagers are the worst. Fifteen years ago you had guys driving up and down the two main streets in town, big cars that looked one step removed from a junkyard. Now the cars are louder, the colors even louder still, boys cruising all the streets of the city with fluffy dice in their windows and neon lights along the edges of the bodywork, and he doesn’t get it, he just doesn’t get it. It feels like he’s living in some kind of cartoon world with brighter colors where teenagers with shiny cars have gone completely mad.

The people he passes on the street act as if he doesn’t exist. His car is parked half a block away. It’s over a quarter of a century old and the only thing he knows about this car is that there’s something under the hood that coughs and splutters every few minutes but still manages to get him around town. The guy he bought the car from had stripped the stereo out and replaced it with a piece of plywood that he’d painted black. He drives from the bad part of town to a slightly less bad part of town, networking his way through the suburbs.

It takes twenty minutes to get to her house. Driving a car was just like riding a bike-everything came back the moment he got behind the wheel. His license expired years ago but that’s only an issue if he gets pulled over. Drivers are worse these days, no doubt about it, and there must be twice as many of them on the roads. Nobody knows how to use a traffic circle. Nobody seems to remember what a signal light is for.

He doesn’t much like her neighborhood. Back when he used to have a family he lived in a pretty good place, friendly neighbors, nice homes. His own house had four bedrooms and two storeys and room for a pool in the backyard if they wanted one. The house he’s looking at now looks like it probably has a pool forming on the floor of the living room. The roof has a couple of missing tiles and a tarpaulin is covering part of it. Maybe, just maybe, prison might have been better than this house. He parks down the road beneath a streetlight that doesn’t work. He puts his hand on the door but doesn’t pull the handle. Instead he sits in the car and stares at the house. He’s nervous. For a dead man, that’s quite an accomplishment. He isn’t real sure what his opening line is going to be to the woman inside.

Maybe he should bring her beer. It’s still in the back of the car.

He’s still debating how to deal with her when a taxi pulls up outside the house and gives two quick taps of the horn. After a moment Ariel Chancellor steps from the house, glancing at her watch as she walks quickly to the taxi, a dress so short he looks away as she climbs in. She shuts the door and talks to the taxi driver. They talk for about a minute before they pull away from the curb, and he guesses they are negotiating the fare.

Damn it, he’s missed his chance. He should have come last night, or any other night since being out of jail.

He starts the car up and begins to follow the taxi.

Schroder has the passenger window down, and is scraping the mud off his shoes with a penknife and flicking it outside. The rain doesn’t seem to be coming back. Traffic is backed up about a thousand feet before the scene. Media vans are cutting each other off to be the first ones to send out pictures. I don’t have authority because I’m not in a police car, so can’t flash any sirens or honk for people to get out of the way. Both of us continually swear as we inch forward. The inside of the car is cold and the seats feel damp and the backs of my legs are itchy. A passenger plane is soaring off into the distance overhead, the people onboard all with somewhere better to be. We arrive at a cordon manned by four police officers. Schroder shows them his badge and they let us through.

It’s quarter past ten and life feels like it’s rewound a few hours; similar buildings, similar groups of people standing around watching, similar dead guy to have died a similar death. The only differences are the names of the people and the place and the absence of police detectives running off to take a leak. The dead man’s double is Albert McFarlane. The role of Bernie is being played by a similar looking man in a similar suit, only this one doesn’t have badges stuck to it. More lighting is set up, a new group of onlookers, there are different people here but they’re thinking the same question- what in the hell is going on?

We step out into a night that is dropping a couple of degrees every hour. The air is completely still. There are no birds anywhere. Everybody is talking in library whispers. We move past two officers who nod at us stoically. We step up onto the porch. The deck groans softly beneath our weight. The front door is painted bright blue and is wide open. The air inside isn’t any warmer than outside. The view isn’t any prettier than the last house. In fact, it’s worse. This time the blood has been thrown up onto the ceiling fan. The fan, spinning, has whipped the droplets from the blades around the room, creating a line halfway up the wall like the ring around a bath. It looks like Morse code, lots of dots and dashes, almost like a cry for help. The dead man was stabbed so many times the blade kept throwing more blood up to the fan to redistribute, the law of physics meeting up with the law of creativity.