|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Posted: Sat Dec 10, 2016 4:40 pm
God had two hands. Mercy was one, for the repentant. Not the innocent. There had been only one innocent person in the history of the world, long murdered. But even the most sinful man could choose...differently. For that man, the man who was merciful, there was a chance of receiving mercy in return.
The other hand was Justice. The reception of due penalty for cruelness, hatred, sinfulness, a visitation of wrath that did not end with death, but began with it, sent to abject misery and destruction. That hand belonged to God only, and yet...
He had two tattoos.
One for each hand.
God acted through his Creation. Whirlwinds of fire. Floods. And sometimes through the righteous.
God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment.
And for men too...
Men are like irrational animals, creatures of instinct, born to be captured and destroyed.
If he understood anything, it was this. Two hands. Mercy, for the repentant. Protection, grace, forgiveness for the weak and poor and mournful. And for the enemies of God, destruction and ruin.
All this was written in blood. Purity, forgiveness, uncleanliness, wrath.
Judgement.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2016 1:02 pm
Lawrence had been running for as long as he could remember, moving from place to place to keep ahead of the law. He kept to the poor counties, the places where people died and no one cared too much, junkies, prostitutes, people who society had forgotten about. He had done his research and changed his methods each time, never stopping or staying.
He wasn't so different from the hollow eyed junkies he dealt with, and he knew it, only his addiction was one that turned the toxins outward into the world around him. He was however as much a vehicle as all the others, likely seeming hollow and vacant in his own way to them. He killed because he felt compelled to do it, because in his flat, dead life there was no other bump of pleasure or satisfaction than that felt when feeling the dying flutters of life leave a body. It was a compulsion and he'd read books where other killers spoke about it feeling like having the devil on your back. To him it was much the same, the thrill the sickening mind-addling one which resembled orgasm and was accompanied by the same twist of disgust afterwards when he was left with a body, a cleanup job and the nauseous question of what and why he'd just done it.
Across one of his cheeks he'd gained a long fingernail scratch, it had healed over but to him it represented the beginning of the end, a distinguishing mark which represented the first crack in his perfect facade, a hairline fracture which threatened to crumble all he'd built. He knew there was only one way all of this could end and that was in death. It didn't bother him that it would, after all everyone died in the end, some just went out more spectacularly than others.
He'd had a life once, but it felt long ago and very very far away. Someone had left him and he'd decided that that would never happen again. He'd been chasing control ever since.
Rodney had run into him at an art show. He liked art, he found a beauty in it which entangled humanity with the world around them. To him it looked like a means to engage with a world that mostly felt distant to him. Rodney was pleasant, artistic, spiritual and all the things he admired.
He wasn't like the usual prey that Lawrence hunted down, not exactly his "type, he tended towards people worn out and weak, the kind of quarry that couldn't hurt him. Rodney was larger than him physically and was strong and vital. His lifestyle had left him a slender coyote of a man, more smile than substance.
It had been careless to bring a victim so close to Rodney's house, to trust that the other man wouldn't be home, that he knew his routine.
Really he hadn't known anything at all.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2016 3:18 pm
They'd been friends.
Rodney didn't have many. He attended church, and there were a few earnest souls who didn't sleep through the sermons, for whom working within the church wasn't status and a job and politics. But for the rest, it was superficial. A social activity. Belonging, them or us.
You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside, but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and every impurity. 28In the same way, you appear to be righteous on the outside, but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.
He could hardly stand to go. But there were a few that were earnest. So he went. Some like him. Lost, who prayed and wept and didn't belong. Sinners, but repenting...every day, grieving with the hope of one day coming home.
In art, it wasn't different. Most of them saw belief in God (although they wouldn't say it to his face) as stupid and common. Art was about deconstruction. Intention. Expression and understanding, and to analyze and represent the world with abstraction meant a certain destruction of mystery. It, too, was business and politics and a social activity with a different set of unspoken rules.
It meant something to him. They both meant something to him.
And Lawrence had meant something too.
He took it all just as seriously. Lawrence was not Christian, but he looked to art and God with the same longing, a grieved and hungry man. He knew it was all just as dire, and he, too, was a seeker. And Rodney had always thought, for that kind of person, even if God had not placed them in his hand yet...
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you ... Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?
And Lawrence was searching. He was so sure. They alone had understood each other...or, Rodney thought he had.
Maybe all along, it had all been a different kind of understanding.
Maybe...
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2016 3:29 pm
There was something automatic and instinctual about the act of it, an act that was both private and intimate while being taboo and forbidden. He hadn't expected anyone to be there, planning meticulously as always. He'd just factored Rodney too softly into his plans and now it was too late.
If he let go of the windpipe and knelt off of the prone man now, he'd probably be brain damaged or some other messy cleanup. He'd tell someone what happened and everything would come to an end all the more rapidly.
So he didn't. Instead he could only look away from Rodney, bowing his head as if in some travesty of repentant prayer so that he didn't need to look, didn't need to see himself through the mirror of the other man's opinion. The man under him was so much meat, he would have been satisfying, all of this would have been satisfying but now it left a strange uncomfortable taste in his mouth instead.
"I can't." he said, still holding on with the vice grip his wiry muscles were capable of. "I can't stop now. It's over."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2016 3:42 pm
"Who is he?" Rodney asked softly and dizzily, as if the world spun on the question. He did not stop his friend.
It was not about death. It had never been about that.
Two hands.
He had two hands...Mercy. Justice. He clenched and unclenched them while he waited, and felt sweat on his neck.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2016 3:46 pm
Who was he? Did it matter? Had it ever mattered? The world didn't care about who lived or died, there was no rhyme or reason to it, people left without warning or meaning. His mother had died, his father hadn't, it had been callous and random. His killings too were callous, opportunistic and random too.
"I don't know." he said. "A junkie." And went on. "Willing to give sexual favours for money." It felt strange even responding to the body under him as "he", to even dignify him as a person. "It is the ones no one will miss." Because fundamentally he was a coward.
"I'll get rid of him." he said, as if the mess would be the problem. "I'm good at it, I'll get rid of him and then I'll go. You won't need to worry about me again."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2016 4:05 pm
"H...he's just, sick, not- hold- hold on, let me see," Rodney said, finally intervening, and despite of his usually timid appearance he was strong, pulling Lawrence's hands free as if they were a child's. He had a pair of soft gloves in his pocket, which he put on. Not leather. Some fake material.
He tilted the man's face carefully. It was an unnatural color. Dry and yellow spittle was on his lips. Rodney felt his neck.
"Gone," he said. The word was very calm.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2016 4:10 pm
Lawrence found himself on the edge of a strange shrill sort of panic. It was unusual, normally he barely broke his stride during these sort of things, if he broke a sweat it was from nothing but exertion. Rodney's hands at his wrists felt like something that was uncomfortably present and real in the face of the clammy man he'd gotten hold of.
There was something about the proclamation of the man's fate which also felt a little too final to him, it made him feel like he wanted to squirm but for the first time there was nowhere he could think of to run to and no particular way out.
He didn't say sorry because he wasn't sorry. "You need to make really sure." he said. "I had one of them come to, the pulse gets... it gets very faint. Sometimes."
He couldn't meet Rodney's eyes at all.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Sun Dec 11, 2016 5:35 pm
"If he lives, it will be because God spared him," Rodney said, releasing the man. He kept his gloves on, "and if not, God will judge him today."
The hands flexed.
"Just as...today he brought me here."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2016 3:04 am
Lawrence didn’t interfere, he was very dazed by the whole situation, trapped in a strange sort of between state where he hadn’t attained his usual levels of satisfaction or release but also had expended his energy and resources completely. Rodney’s response had not been what he’d expected, he’d expected panic, possibly screaming, perhaps fainting, something wild and dramatic. He’d expected to have to kill the other man to keep him quiet, reluctantly ending their friendship that he’d found so very pleasant. Instead he was at a complete loss, unsure what to do with the cold flat way the other man had reacted, finding something deeply unsettling about the way he resigned the man’s fate to some divine power. He finally managed to tear his eyes up from his victim, looking at Rodney in a way that was curious more than it was fearful. He’d never really had the emotional stamina to maintain fear, it required a lot of component parts he was fundamentally missing. Lawrence had gloves himself, though his were an expensive and soft leather of a designer brand, stolen from a victim a very long time ago and carried (somewhat carelessly) as a trophy ever since. He caught his breath. “I would have preferred you did not find out this way.” He said. Perhaps it was implicit that he preferred Rodney had found out with hands about his throat.
--
When Rodney looked back at him, it wasn't curiousity or fear, but immense sadness, like a weight had been put on his shoulders.
"Would you have told me?" he asked.
What did it mean? Why his friend, his only friend...
"We shouldn't stay here," he said, soft, and putting a gloved hand on Lawrence's back. It was December, and the gloves weren't out of place. "Come with me. It's over, like you said. My home isn't far."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2016 3:54 am
"You would have known in due course." he said earnestly, confused by the tone of sadness in the other man's voice. It was that same uncertainty that crept in so many times when his parents or siblings had found something he did inadequate. He never understood then and he didn't understand now, he should have been afraid or angry, but this was worse.
"I wouldn't leave you in the dark for long." He'd have snapped eventually, overcome by that restlessness and the knowledge it would all end. He wanted to freeze Rodney most of all in a snapshot of forever, a friendship he wouldn't need to depart like everything else.
But he was gone, there was too much behind him to stop, like a twig in front of a train of bad decisions.
The touch, even gloved and through a thick coat felt hypersensitive and made his skin goosebump. He almost reached to take Rodney's hand, in a strange almost post-coital haze. It reminded him of the suggestible clinginess of some submissives after a particularly intense session of bdsm, except this was him. Normally he was alone and it faded before he had to deal with anyone else. He just wanted control.
"Yes." he said. "I'm sorry if the secrecy offended you, it was rude." Because that he was sorry about, even if he wasn't sorry about the slowly cooling vessel of flesh that lay behind them both.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2016 4:28 am
Rodney was able to afford seclusion, and his property had miles of woodland. "Not far", was relative, but he often came into town, and outside the city limits parts of the land were still wild.
Rodney took him to a parking garage, where his car was waiting, and opened the door. He left the windows up and started the heat, leaning against the driver side door while Lawrence buckled his seatbelt.
"It's not the secrets," Rodney said, "We didn't talk about some of the more personal aspects of our lives. Neither of us. There are things I have to show you, too."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2016 6:56 am
Lawrence had had money once, but it was far away now too, left behind in the wake of his nomadic life, he’d bought a car, clothes and the other things he felt like he’d need but most of them had been left behind along the road. He was still winding down as he got into the car and the warmth leeched into his bones in a satisfying sort of way – he’d begun to forget what it was like to live like a normal person, closer in lifestyle to the hitchhikers and junkies in the state than a normal citizen. It was bizarrely as if by basking himself in so much of their lives and deaths that he’d taken on some part of them.
He wasn’t sure what Rodney could show him that was comparable to his own secret life but it no longer seemed to matter. There was a sense of relief at the discovery, as if there’d been a pressure which had been building for decades and only this alleviated it. He’d expected it to be police who found him and had had many restless nights in that vein. Prison was his greatest fear, for a definition of fear, tangled up with humiliation which was the true terror of everything. Dignity was the single most important thing to him and he maintained it even in the face of a life of chaos.
“I want to know you better.”
--
In all the time they'd known each other, Rodney had never invited Lawrence to his home, but all-told invitations were few and far between.
"My guest room is empty," Rodney said, because of course it was. Because he'd need it now, for this...
"And, I know you had asked about my studio, and that I had always made excuses..."
The buildings grew further and further apart. It was strange how quickly the bustle of businesses became long stretches of nothing. Rodney's truck barely hitched as it mounted the back roads.
--
Lawrence looked almost excited at the prospect of a guest room, his eyebrows quirking perceptibly. “I’d like that.” He said, it sounded safe, somewhere that the police wouldn’t find him, a chance to see how Rodney lived in his own day to day life. “I’ve always wanted to see how you worked.” He wasn’t artistic himself beyond piano playing or singing, something he’d not had the chance to do in what felt like forever. The music had gone out of his life as he turned his talents to something else, it was difficult to even feel he had a right to play a piano when his hands were used for such dire things on the day to day.
He didn’t even seem aware of any sort of conventional social protocol around what Rodney had just witnessed, unable to read other human beings enough to note the dissonance in the reaction to his friend being essentially a murderer. Maybe this was how everyone would respond, it wasn’t a situation that came up all the time.
“It’s so quiet out here.” He said. “I bet it is gorgeous in the summer time.”
--
"Do you like it?" Rodney asked, the question sincere. "It's a resting place. It's why I had my house built. I'll show you the garden, too."
The entrance to Rodney's property was a simple metal locked gate across the dirt road. Easy to walk around. He got out to undo the chain, then swung it open for the truck to pass. He did it easily, like he'd done it a hundred times before.
The driveway went up, and up, and up, winding through a long dark road made dim by the overeaching trees and grey sky. The house itself was beautiful and warm, made from wood and stone with a wrap around porch.
"Heading in? I need to fix supper." He grabbed some bags of groceries out of the back. He always got enough for two. Just in case. "You can talk about it, if you want to," Rodney said, "It's just us."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2016 8:23 am
Lawrence admired the house openly. "It's gorgeous." He said, not one for hyperbole at the best of times. It reminded him of trips as a child to his uncle's cabin, rural and humble but somehow to the young Lawrence written so large as to leave even the grandest cathedrals hollow and dead. It had always been warm, brimming with life and family and yet it was closed to him now. If he went back he'd drag all the threads of despair with him like strands of tar and sap the light out of the place. He felt now like a dog being invited in from the cold by Rodney, back to a place he had no right being but which longing compelled him to go.
"I can't remember when I last felt rested." And he stretched his memory back as far as he possibly could looking for anything that wasn't just ticking over and waiting for the next time he'd snap and need another victim and another home. "I had a wife who left me" he said. "I don't think I ever got back what she took." And for just a second he held his stomach in a subconscious gesture, as if the hunger he felt physically was just a front for a deeper yearning he didn't know how to satisfy.
He almost offered to take a bag before reminding himself he didn't need to, he didn't need to sweeten up Rodney the way he had everyone else. So he just let the other stronger man carry them as they went.
"But its hard to talk about. It's been years. Ten? Fifteen? I don't know. I lost count." He'd lost a lot of things. "Sometimes it comes for me, like a presence, like I become someone else. I was always good at becoming someone else. Acting. Being a con man. It was simple. But that person was too addictive, too intoxicating, I felt like god."
He wasn't god. God could stop. Couldn't he? Maybe he couldn't, maybe that was why everything had become so horrible and out of control. Maybe this was what it meant.
"I guess some part of me thought you seeing would stop it, that I'd finally feel ashamed." he hung his head. "I don't. I don't regret it, I only regret that none of it felt like my choice." And there was something scrunched up and bitter in the very heart of him about the life that couldn't be and his words were slightly pained as he went on. "I tell myself it's what I wanted, but what I really would want is to be able to live in a place like this with you. To go back. To go back before."
The hand still resting on his stomach moved up to his heart and he looked so tired. "How did I get here?"
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2016 10:55 am
"You can stay," Rodney said, and didn't mind carrying the groceries up the stairs. "When the conscience is seared with a hot iron, it doesn't feel the iron again. The scar tissue has to be removed, the heart softened. But...that's nothing you or I could do."
He toed the door open.
"The bathroom's down the hall, if you want to wash up. Repentance isn't a feeling. It's a choice, that everyone has to make," Rodney sounded almost broken saying it, "The...relief, release, a changed heart, that...comes from God only."
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reply
