"The first good-looking girl I see tonight is going to die."
- Edmund Kemper
FOURTEEN
ALL I COULD HEAR WAS RINGING. Incessant, loud and ear-wrenching ringing. My hands cupped my ears and my eyes were scrunched in an attempt to block out the noise. But I had to be doing the opposite because the noise was coming from me, from within. Was I dying? Did being shot in the face sound like a fire alarm?
I forced my eyes open and took around my surroundings. I knew where I was and I knew what had happened. Hugh had shot me, but for some reason, I felt no pain and I was still standing.
"Oh God." A familiar voice gasped behind me and I spun around. Diana stood there, her hands tight against a smoking gun, and her eyes bloodshot. She was bleeding from the side of her head, and I knew it was because Hugh had slammed the butt of his gun against it to knock her out earlier on.
Diana looked dishevelled, her night gown dress slacked at the neck and her blood stained the sleeves. I noticed instantly that she was shaking, quite violently. Whether it was out of fear or anger or a combination of both was difficult to decipher.
The gun remained up, however, now aimed at me.
She hadn't noticed because her eyes were downcast.
Trailing my eyes to where hers was trained, my hands flew to my mouth to hold back my breathless scream. I had momentarily forgotten my earlier situation because of the gun shock.
There he lay, surrounded in a halo of his own blood, my prodigal brother.
Diana had shot him in the face, just as he was supposed to do me. His head had burst open from behind his eye socket, revealing pieces of him that I hadn't known existed. His internal organs circled his head like a grotesque crown and I felt bile rise in my throat.
Ever since I was a child, I had conjured an image of my brother that was so vile that I had never even thought that he was just like me. He had a brain, a heart, nerves, and bones. He could bleed. He was human too.
And Diana had blasted him to Hell.
"W..what..did..what..did you do?" I stuttered, fear and surprise drowning me entirely. I stumbled back from his body and banged into a nearby wall.
In this moment, I knew that the scene before me would be violently seared in my brain forever. I knew it.
Diana looked up and once we caught eyes, her lips began to tremble. She opened her mouth to speak but all that came out was a cry. She was sobbing. Her sobs were tattooed with a release of years of abuse. Somewhere in there, relief was evident too.
"I k...killed him." She whispered. Taking two steps towards the mangled body for a better look, her eyes widened the more it dawned on her what she had really done. "I killed Hugh."
My eyes were fleeting from her gaze to the gun that was still pointed at me. She had saved my life but she now had my life in her hands. "Diana..."
On hearing her name, she lifted her head slowly to me as if jolting out of a trance. "Aria?"
"The gun." I whispered weakly.
Gasping, she dropped the gun as though it burned her fingers. "I..I'm..sorry." She muttered, trembling physically and emotionally as she took one more glance at Hughs corpse.
And before my brain could come out of my shock to throw in two words, something changed. She let out a breath, a hurdled one. Then she chuckled. And then Diana laughed, and laughed, and laughed, for long minutes. It was altogether humourless and painful to hear.
Soon after, the laughs died down to sobs.
Her mixed emotions struck me on the wrong chord because all the while, I was looking into the dead eyes of our brother.
Something about what Diana had done felt awfully disturbing to me. She had done something more heinous than Hugh had ever done, she had reached over a metaphorical line and snagged the prize that Hugh had been lining up to win.
She had killed. She had killed a man. My brother. Her brother. Our brother.
Mother would've keeled over.
"Where's mother?" I whispered.
For some irrational reason, my brain was refusing to process the body, the blood and the gore that surrounded me. Even as I had blood on the front of my clothes and in my hair, my emotions were not able to cope with the capacity of the sin Diana had committed.
"Mother!" Diana shouted, remembering suddenly, and then pushed past me and out the room. "Mom, where are you?!" She yelled, and I could hear doors slamming, doorknobs jolting and the floor boards creaking as she searched frantically for our mother that I knew so well was dead.
"She's dead." I whispered.
The ringing within me had stopped but the sound of my heart beat was challenging the initial noise. I was rooted to the spot in all forms and I could do was breathe. Inhale. Exhale. Repeat. That's all I knew how to do in that moment.
"Mom!"
I'll kill you like I killed the thing you call a mother.
"Mom!"
The bullet blew her brains out like confetti.
"Mom!"
See you all in hell.
"Mom!"
And the faint voice of my mother slithered towards us. "Diana...?"
I spun around on hearing it. It was frail, weak, slightly familiar but still there. Hugh was lying, he didn't really kill her.
She was alive.
___
BANSHEE SLAPPED ME ON THE FACE and spat on me. He wrapped his grim hands around my neck and squeezed hard enough to kill me. He might have killed me, had I not left the interview room.
He did all this in the manner that he always did. He did all this to me simply by opening his mouth. It was a grotesque talent that only one who mastered all the sins could easily do. It was a skill for the damned.
"I'm not in your fucking mood." Banshee had said once he walked in. His stride was a lot harsher, there was a jolt in his step and his face was hard with dirty things within it. I could tell just by watching him that I needed to walk on ice whilst I spoke to him.
"That's fine." I muttered.
My nightmare had tired me out. I had barely slept last night and I didn't have enough time to check if Mirabel had replied my email or sent me the file. I was running solely on caffeine and fear. It was a battle of which was working the best.
Banshee paused, gauging my expression and then settled in his chair properly. His scowl hadn't moved and his voice was still on edge. "You're not in my mood either, are you?"
"I guess not."
He leaned closer to the glass, wanting me to see his expression. As indifferent as it truly was. "A moment of silence then, for the fuck I could've given. It just died."
He had to have woke up on the wrong side of the bed.
"Did you sleep well?"
He quirked a brow. I could tell he wanted to criticise the question but for some reason, he did the opposite. His eyes were amused but his face remained taut. "As a matter of fact, I did. Slept like a fucking baby."
I sighed. "How can you do that?"
"What?"
"Sleep so easily knowing all the fucked up shit you've done."
He snorted. Literally.
"Nicholas, do you not get nightmares?"
"Wait. You're serious?"
I shrugged.
He rose both brows, incredulous. My question seemed to hit him on the chord that I was not aiming for. "Are you fucking kidding me?"
I shook my head, exasperated. How was it that I could barely get a night sleep in on a good day but Banshee slept like he ate prayers for dinner. "No."
"I don't get nightmares, Aria." He started. "Because I feel no guilt."
He was disgusting. It was sad that he still felt that he had justifiable reasons that could stop him from feeling guilty about his heinous crimes. How could one slit the neck of a child after making him watch his parents die and still sleep peacefully?
Only a psychopathic murderer like Nicholas could do so.
Nicholas broke me out of my thoughts process with a question that filled me with ice. "Do you get nightmares?"
I shook my head vehemently. I hated his words. "None of your business."
He shook away my words, the vehemence in them. Nicholas absent mindedly trailed a finger across his lips. "I don't understand guilt, you know."
I scowled. "It's usually what you feel when you've done something heinous. Like killing someone for instance."
He cocked his head to the side.
"Do you even know what it feels like to kill someone?" He said, toying with the chains on his hand. His fingers trailed softly over the metal that joined both hands together. "The feeling could be anything. For me, it was grief. Blackened, hollow grief. I wanted to die."
"After the first death, the emptiness of the whole ordeal is what drove me to do more. I hated that I could feel nothing. I wanted a victim that would make me feel. No one pressed that button within me and it pissed me the fuck off." He shook his head, disagreeing. "No. It didn't piss me off. Anger wasn't my reaction. It hurt me."
"Is that why you cried?"
Fuck.
Nicholas was standing in a split second and the chair he was sitting on had toppled to the closet ground. It happened too quick for me to process.
He stood with his hands balled into fists at his side. "I wasn't crying, you stupid fucking bitch."
It was such a violent response that rather than scare me, it spurred me on. "The name Banshee was given to you for a reason."
His eyes narrowed. He sighed heavily and leaned down to pick up his chair. Scraping it along the floor, he set it upright and backwards. He sat on it with his arms rested on the chairs head. "What's your biggest regret?"
I didn't answer straight away. I wasn't too sure whenever he asked me a question, whether or not it was a rhetorical.
"Want to know mine?"
I nodded, softly.
"Not killing my mother sooner." He deadpanned. In that moment, I knew this was a correlation answer to my previous question.
"I killed her, took a gun to the middle of her chest and blew her organs out. Can't forget how much she bled. There was blood everywhere. On the walls of the kitchen, the floor, the sink, in the food." He lifted his bruised hands and showed me. "Blood on my hands, my clothes, my hair. When someone died that violently it was usually because the killer intended to do so."
He caught my eyes for the first time today. "I didn't intend it."
My eyes widened infinitesimally.
"I wanted her to die but not like that. I had fantasised about it for so long. I wanted it to be quick, painless and easy." He shook his head, scrunching his eyes shut. I could see the pan in his features. Nicholas still felt things, even after a decade. "I had used the wrong gun."
His mother's death was a qualifying trigger for his crimes.
"Her blood everywhere just reminded me of her. I'd have to clean it up, I'd have to pick up the pieces of her that she left behind." His voice was strained but thoroughly menacing. He didn't like reliving it but he was on a roll. "It was too much for me. Too fucking much."
I closed my eyes to block out the imagery but I couldn't help my words that pushed through. "What did you feel afterwards?"
I knew he was watching me. He was speaking because I had asked and indulged him.
"I missed her once I lost her."
My eyes flew open at the revelation. This was it. The climax, the tip of the ice berg. We were finally getting somewhere.
"It burned me deeply, how much I missed her and I was the one who had taken her away. It was strange. A blessing and a curse in one split second. The myraid of feelings that I felt were so fucking overwhelming. Like euphoria. An orgasm. Call it what you fucking want." He muttered.
"She was the first person I had killed. Killing the others, was," He gestured his hands in a circular motion, searching for the right phrase. "It was like a repeat of history."
I wanted to throw up. "But when you killed the others, you couldn't feel what you felt again."
"Bingo."
So this was it.
It wasn't the reason he killed his victims, it wasnt even close. He couldve killed them for any other reason. But this was why he cried. This was why the press branded him a Banshee.
His reason was not because his victims didn't deserve the shit they were being put through. Not because he felt remorse for his actions. Not anything but for the fact that he didn't orgasm like he had when he had killed his mother.
"You make me sick." I whispered, harrowed by the things he had just said. I wanted to leave. He might as well have slapped me and I could've stomached it a lot easier.
"If that isn't your reaction to me, then you're not human."
"Why can't you just be normal, good, an innocent man? Don't you prefer it?" I muttered. My voice was low because it was like telling a person with depression to just smile :) it's not that hard!
It didn't work that way.
Nicholas groaned in frustration and then slammed his fists down on the table. "For fuck sake!" His eyes blazed with renewed anger. "You're all so horribly conditioned to accept love, protect everybody and their shitty fucking values just because people will rave about you? Dash out awards and medals for being a fucking kiss ass?"
"That's not-"
He cut me off by spitting in my face. His saliva landed on the glass. It landed at the same time as his words did. "Fuck you. Fuck you, and the people I killed. I'm sick of this shit. I'm sick of you and everybody trying to be so goddamn good. And if you tell me one more time that I'm wrong for killing those people, I will reach over and kill you too. Believe me, Aria."
My reaction was nothing severe. I was getting accustomed to his violent tendencies.
Watching him now was fascinating.
His lips were curled upwards in a sneer, and I noticed for once that he had bags under his eyes. His hair was longer, now falling over his face wildly. His hands weren't as bruised as before though, only reddened at the wrists by the strain of the handcuffs. He looked distressed and wild.
He looked like an animal in a cage. It was utterly saddening.
"Nothing works. Does it?" I muttered.
He blinked. "What?"
"You've been here for a decade and yet you still lack remorse. You think you're right for killing them. Prison doesn't help you, does it?"
"Are you serious?"
I nodded my head.
He spoke like he couldn't see the saliva streaming down the glass. He shifted his weight to one elbow. "Tell me, Aria, do you think prison would help you? Being locked up in a building for years, away from the world that failed to understand you. would that change you?"
I stayed silent.
"I'll say that's a no."
I jerked my head at him. "You think it doesn't work."
"Honestly? I don't know why the police wastes their damn time with people like me."
I folded my arms on the table, leaning closer this time. "So what should they police do with the Nicholas Dementias of the world?"
He paused for a long time. In thought. And then he spoke in that cultured, smooth and easy voice that made me forget what he was. "In my opinion?"
"In your honest opinion, Nicholas."
"Kill us." He deadpanned. "Death by torture."
______
AN: Mindhunters reference! I'm thinking of doing a fun fact thing for the criminals I use in my quotations. I'll call it not-so-fun fact. Just to keep discussion going.
Not-so-fun fact about Edmund Kemper: After gruesomely murdering his mother, Edmund had intercourse with her severed head because he claimed she had blamed him for her lack of male partners.