Allan Leverone - Mr. Midnight

“Mmmph mmmph mmmph mmmmmph,” Rae Ann replied, resuming her impressive routine of head-shaking and body-thrashing. It occurred to Milo that his little deception had not fooled her. She knew she was in for pain. There just wasn’t anything she could do about it.

He displayed his pliers for her with a flourish, holding them in front of her eyes, which she had squeezed tightly shut as though she might be able to make the whole nightmare disappear. Eventually, though, Milo knew she would become curious and reopen them, and eventually she did. The terror in them blossomed at the sight of the small hand tool.

The pliers seemed relatively benign to Milo, grey steel pincers with curved handles covered in red rubberized plastic for a firm grip. Rae Ann didn’t see them as benign, though, probably thanks to her slightly different perspective. She was clearly terrified.

In a quick motion, he fell to his knees in front of his guest. To anyone entering the shabby apartment at that exact moment, he might have looked like a nervous suitor proposing marriage to his young girlfriend. Except, of course, that the bride-to-be had been duct-taped to her chair and blood was dripping steadily from three ruined fingers. But no one walked into the apartment. Milo reached forward, grabbing Rae Ann’s badly injured right hand with his left, holding it steady, waiting patiently for her to calm down.

She never did, and when he got tired of waiting, Milo opened the jaws of the pliers as widely as he could, placed the tempered steel between the first and second knuckles of her swollen pinky finger, and deftly twisted his wrist, snapping the delicate bone with an audible and satisfying Crack! She screamed in agony, the sound muffled almost to the point of inaudibility. Milo removed the pliers and the tip of the finger tilted at nearly a ninety-degree angle, pointing toward the floor, blood dripping more steadily now onto the makeshift plastic tarp.

Rae Ann continued to scream into her gag; she was panting and hyperventilating, and Milo came in his pants without even touching himself. He never tired of the sexual gratification he received from the suffering of his guests. He knew this made him different from most, but was bothered by that fact only inasmuch as it wasn’t always easy to avail himself of a young girl to torture. And now that he had one, he certainly wasn’t about to let her go to waste.

After maybe thirty seconds of what must have been some of the most intense pain the young woman had ever endured—although it was nothing compared to what Milo had in store for her—Rae Ann passed out, her head slumping to the side, her face streaked with tears and snot and drool. It was disgusting

Milo didn’t care. He rose from the floor and went into the bathroom to clean himself up with a dirty towel.

The girl was still unconscious when he came out of the bathroom, so Milo sat on the floor with his back against the wall, watching her and thinking about nothing in particular while waiting for her to wake up so they could have more fun together. She looked so peaceful, nothing like the panicked animal she had been prior to blacking out.

His mind wandered back to the mysterious vision he had experienced earlier in the morning. He was certain he had never seen the young woman from that vision before and wondered why she had inspired such a vile, hate-filled reaction, the intensity of which still surprised and troubled him. As an antisocial personality, undoubtedly diagnosable as a sociopath—Milo Cain had issues with mental stability, he knew that, but he wasn’t stupid—he was used to viewing the world through a lens of anger and mistrust, but his reaction to the girl in the vision had been off the charts, even for him.

What did that mean? Even now, sitting here recalling the vision, he could feel the hate bubbling up inside him like a rapidly filling well, causing his pulse to race and his breathing to quicken. Even now, hours later, the mere thought of the bitch—it was only the young woman, the other two people in the room inspired nothing more in him than his usual disgust and loathing—caused a blackness to fill his already-corrupted soul and thoughts of murder and mayhem to swell in his consciousness, almost to the exclusion of everything else.

The girl in the vision was young and pretty, roughly his own age, and she radiated goodness and decency, two things he hated, despite the fact he wished he could have them. But it was more than that. There were plenty of people, even in his shabby orbit, who were good and decent and who didn’t make him feel as though he wanted to rip them apart with his bare hands, who didn’t inspire this single-minded desire to rend and destroy and kill.

In the vision, the girl had been discussing her heritage, mostly listening while the older woman held court, occasionally asking questions, occasionally displaying flashes of anger. It was righteous anger, Milo could tell, and that was another thing that pissed him off. Who the hell did she think she was, the goddamned righteous beautiful bitch?

Another wave of bilious rage swept over him and he went with it, closing his eyes and envisioning what he would do if (when) he ever caught up with her. He would hurt her, he would torture her, he would make her wish she had never been born, he would do things to her that would make this pliers activity with Rae Ann the Schoolgirl Hooker seem like child’s play, like Arts and Crafts time for a preschooler.

Milo realized his eyes were screwed tightly shut and water was leaking from them. He was crying like a fucking baby while picturing all of the things he would do to the unknown and unnamed girl from his vision. He sniffled and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and realized he needed to blow his nose.

That realization made him think of his houseguest and her snot-covered face. He was going to have to clean her up before he could play with her again. He glanced across the room and saw that she had awakened and was watching him. Her eyes were filled with the fear he had come to expect, as well as with the terrible pain that must be radiating outward from her yanked-out fingernails and especially from her broken, mangled pinky finger.

But there was something else as well, Milo thought. In her eyes a hint of laughter shone through, a hidden smile, a mocking contempt for the weakness she had caught him displaying. It was like the time his mother had caught him jerking off in bed when he was twelve. She had been shocked and angry, there was no doubt about that, but Milo had also glimpsed the same barely masked contempt he was seeing here.

There had been nothing he could do back then. He was twelve and his mother was…well…something, he wasn’t really sure how old she was, but she had been a hell of a lot older than he, and had held all the power along with his asshole father. That was not the case now, though. Milo Cain was in charge now, and if this Rae Ann the Schoolgirl Hooker bitch thought she could get away with mocking him, he would make good and goddamn certain she would never make that error in judgment again.

He rose to his feet with renewed vigor. As much as he was going to enjoy the upcoming session with Rae Ann, it would now have a little added meaning thanks to her arrogant disregard of the power structure in their burgeoning relationship. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his trusty pliers, snap, snap, snapping them absently as he approached her chair.

Cait stared at her mother, again rendered speechless by a statement that had taken her completely by surprise. She realized her mouth was hanging open and she closed it. “I must not have heard you correctly. I thought you said my twin brother would have murdered me by now if we had grown up together.”