my r/nosleep favorites | volume one

I Dared My Best Friend to End My Life - FINAL UPDATE [Part 6]

continuing from part 5

I couldn't leave you all on such a terrible cliffhanger. Clark lacks the suspense in his writing that Zander was able to leverage. His cliffhangers are lackluster. Allow me to intervene.

Let me tell you the real story of David Fucking King, as you all so vehemently call him.

David knew from an early age that he was different. That he was better than most people. His peers were concerned with sports and other useless activities, while David learned how people worked. He learned how to manipulate people early on, and it served him well his whole life.

He always enjoyed control. Control was everything to him. That's why manipulation served him so well.

His parents didn't approve of his favorite activities. He loved to design traps. He told me once that traps were all based on behavior, and that trap-making was a natural extension of his core ability to understand motivations and manipulate them.

They brought him to a psychologist, who analyzed him for some time. The psychologist, of course, became scared of David. Since the psychologist was trained to see signs of manipulation, David had a hard time controlling him.

So he killed him. It was David's first real kill.

He's admitted once to me that he regretted killing his psychologist. David wished he had tried harder to manipulate the one person in his life who refused to comply. He wished he had let the psychologist challenge him. Instead, he took the easy route.

I, of course, applaud David for killing him. The man would have committed David to an institution forever the moment he had the chance. He'd already tried to hold him in confinement once, but David manipulated his way out of that trap. If he hadn't killed the psychologist, he might never have met me.

If I attached labels to my emotions, I suppose I did love David King. Not in a "I want a stable future with you" way, but as a type of adoration. I'm a manipulator myself, and meeting someone who was able to manipulate me was... thrilling.

He had me spinning around doing tricks for him without me even realizing it. David truly was a master at his craft.

We met after the dare with Zander began. He talked about it with some regularity, and I offered suggestions. After only a short while, however, he stopped talking about Zander.

I asked him about it, and he said the exercise was boring him because Zander refused to fight back. He guessed that Zander had even forgotten about their dare and chalked his small misfortunes up to bad luck. He had things planned, but they were dependent on Zander trying to fight back. I made some suggestions, but nothing cheered him up.

That's when I brought home Jack Hemsey. We weren't living together, but he came to my house with some regularity.

"Who's this?" He asked when he came to my home after work one day.

"Your new student," I laughed, guiding Jack over to him. "Jack here is dying to learn your craft."

"My craft?" David said dubiously.

"Yes, darling, he wants to learn how to ruin people's lives! It seems he has an enemy that he really despises. I met him online, and I think you could teach him how to take care of his problem."

David reluctantly heard the boy out. Jack was timid, and he acted like a young boy.

Within only a month, Jack's enemy was in prison with enough evidence to convict him when the trial came around. I could see in David's face that he enjoyed that challenge. Jack did too. They bonded so well over it. Jack became confident and outspoken. David supported him. It was similar to a father-son relationship, despite their close ages.