“How did she survive?” he asks himself out loud.
He knows he dragged his blade across the correct spots. It’s something he could never mess up. He feels the failure of just missing the mark again. Missing a major artery is just another reminder of the grave error that led to Emily’s escape all those years ago. Both should have been left rotting in the daytime heat, undiscovered until it was all too late.
“Fuck!” he yells, throwing his spoon in the sink with a crash.
He leans back into the counter and looks around his home. He can’t think of a way out of this, and the feeling is unfamiliar. He could run. He could move on to another place, where his movements won’t be so magnified. It’s the only choice left really, but first he wants to bring Louisiana to its knees.
He strides down the rickety staircase, dragging his fingertips along the exposed rock on the walls. The ancient basement has been updated with a cement floor for functionality, but the bones of an old dirt cellar remain. His father never bothered with making the cellar useful. They used it for storage, but he did all his work outside. When his mother died, Jeremy turned it into his workshop. It was a decent space that had been neglected for too long.
He knows this may be the last time he feels these walls, the last time he listens to the stairs creak and groan beneath his feet. He takes his time. He collects souvenirs with every blink. He never fixed that one light bulb in the corner. It’s been flickering for months. At first, he had just kept forgetting to change it, no doubt distracted by the pleasures awaiting his arrival downstairs. Eventually he had come to appreciate the ghostly glow of the dying bulb. It made the basement look scarier, like a mad scientist’s lab or Leatherface’s workshop. But he won’t be needing the grim ambiance any longer. As he reaches the bottom step, he grabs a fresh light bulb from the box on the shelf to his right. He reaches up easily to unscrew the blinking bulb in the back corner and replaces it with the new one.
Fixed.
The steady light changes things. Without the strobing effect, everything softens. He lets his gaze wander around, wishing he had more time.
It won’t be long before they arrive to tear this place apart. Soon, this will all be reduced to evidence bags and caution tape. Somehow, his current situation is made worse by the knowledge that it was a noncompliant woman who toppled his house of cards.
If this is how his story is going to unfold, he is going to take control of everything he can. He unlocks the pristine deep freezer situated neatly against the wall and enters numbers into its keypad lock. The latch clicks loudly, cutting through the soft hum of the air conditioner. He runs his hand over the top of the lid. It’s cool to the touch as he drums his fingers along the smooth surface. When he opens it, the vacuum seal gasps. It reminds him of lungs deprived of air for almost too long. A blast of cold air hits him in a wave as he gazes down at her. She’s freezer burned. Her skin is like ice, smooth and cold. Dried blood still cakes her cheek. After weeks in the freezer, it has dried and now stains her skin. It looks beautiful in a strange way, like a macabre rouge.
If he turned her over, he’d be able to touch the neatly bandaged wound in her lumbar region. He got it right that time. With this experiment, he had successfully severed the spinal cord at the C6 vertebra. Immediately, his captive lost movement in her legs, trunk, and arms. That’s what was supposed to happen seven years ago, but he has since learned from his botched attempt, perfected it.
An incapacitated victim is easier to work with, but less of a challenge; perfect for a test of scientific prowess rather than athletic endurance. He always wanted to attempt a lobotomy, ever since those early days at the library. She had bled more than he anticipated when he inserted the ice pick into her orbital socket. His initial attempt at the prefrontal lobotomy didn’t go quite as planned. But the father of the ice pick lobotomy had had failures too. Admittedly, he hadn’t anticipated how difficult it would be to place the ice pick in the correct position. Even when he knew he had made a mistake, he still proceeded to the next step of stirring it around, and that’s what really ended things for her. She had shuddered and convulsed. Her eyes bulged, and she tensed so hard that he was sure she would break. Her pain was evident on her face. He can still see her muscles reflexively tightened around her neck and jaw. She would have gritted her teeth down to dust if he hadn’t placed the gag in her mouth. Blood dribbled from her nose like a leaky jug of milk and pooled below.