#11 IN ACTION
(PARIS)
Buried deep below the everyday life of our society lives a world of nightmares-of violence and murder no one dares speak about. It is called the Sinner's Society.
In the murky waters of Chicago's underworld I'm arranged to marr...
"Solitude was my only consolation - deep, dark, deathlike solitude."
―Mary W. Shelley
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Blood.
Garish red in color.
Metallic in taste.
Crucial for survival.
There is something absolutely fascinating about the substance that flows through our veins.
I watch it pool under the man's head, the scalpel sticking out beautifully from his neck.
A work of art.
In my periphery I see a time long long gone, materialize, overshadowing the current time I'm in. Rotting alley walls lurch inwards, threatening to crush us all.
As I lift my eyes from the corpse, the lost time fade away and I see what nobody can see. I'm a Seer and I see things that humans are not supposed to. Arthur C. Clarke once said that behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. That is how my Nancy would try to describe my situation... Ah Nancy, my Nancy. He's a picture, ain't he? Crouched in front of a dead man and a pool of blood. Old resentment froths in his chest. And here's me, the canker in his rose. The restless shadow in his heart. But no one can see me, not where I'm hiding.
And then there is my brother. The seed of depravity mom talked about, the sickness, he is the one to nurture it.
"I'm inside you now. Under your skin. I want to break you, so I can piece you back together."
A tantalizing shiver ripples across my skin as I recall his words, feeling his phantom breath against the shell of my ear.
He was standing behind me in the abandoned garage and I was watching blood pool on the tarp spread out on the concrete floor, the pitter-patter drowned out by the man gasping for air. The prey dangled helplessly from the ceiling, his bare and broken feet slowly splitting apart from the hooks I'd pushed through them some time ago.
With the flesh splitting like the end of a fraying rope, they wouldn't hold him much longer, eventually tearing clean through. With the other lacerations on his body, he'd be dead by then. Well, for his sake he had better be or we'd have to start all over with another body part.
Now resting my elbows on my cocked knees, I rub my fingers over the scar on my forearm, noting the feel of the smooth skin and beveled edges.
"Wa—wass...Oh my god!" The voice of my victim, a thin, reedy warble that reminds me of a whip-poor-will.
I take a deep breath, forcing my anger back down into the shadows of my soul and turn my eyes on— a shade.
Shadowy ghostlike figure, stares at me like I'm a stranger, before realization filters across its face, "Am...am I de—dead!"
