When You Wake up and Scream

Conán was dismayed to find that there was no more booze in the flat. He had drunk it all at some point. He sighed and fished some of the stolen money out, deciding to at least walk down to the off license. It was only late afternoon, so he had plenty of time. If he took his time, he could perhaps scout for a victim on the way home?

Conán got to the off licence half an hour later and picked up as much as the money on him at the precise moment would allow. He always got as much as he could from alternate off licences, so they didn't get suspicious of his drinking habits. As they only saw him alternately, they just thought he was having a get together.

"You got something going on tonight?" the shop assistant asked him, as he put everything through the till.

"Yeah," Conán said vaguely.

"How's everyone getting home?"

"That's a strange question to ask."

The assistant shrugged.

"I was just thinking of that killer who's running around Dublin at the moment. Scary stuff that, isn't it? I mean, you'd expect to hear about that in some big American city, not in Ireland."

Conán gave a small smile.

"Killers can turn up everywhere, you know." he said softly.

"I suppose so. I just don't want any of your mates getting done in on the way home tonight."

"Ah, they'll be all right." Conán spoke of his imaginary guests with ease, used to lying and bluffing. "They'll all stay over, I'd imagine. There's plenty of room on the living room floor."

"I would say after all of this that they'll all be pretty drunk as it was, looking at this lot. They'll be happy where they sleep."

"The wonder of drink."

"I hope you'll not be staying out too late rounding everyone up?"

"Ah, look at me. What would a killer want with me? He'd feel sorry for me."

'Well, you don't know who the victims are going to be, do you? Look at that poor wee girl found the other day – eighteen, she was, you know? And the wee boy after her – seventeen. Whoever's doing this is gradually getting younger and younger. Soon there'll be ten-year-olds turning up throttled."

"I doubt it. I don't think whoever it is would be into that sort of thing."

The shop assistant raised his eyebrows as he took Conán's money.

"You sound like you know a lot."

Conán stayed cool.

"I have a friend who's interested in the psychology of it all. She tends to jump on the closest case possible, and she says that's not his or her sort of prey."

"And what does she say his or her prey is?"

Conán shrugged and smirked to himself as he took his change.

"She reckons it's people who ask too many questions or get too close. She reckons they're a private person."

The imaginary friend was obviously based on Naoise, but Conán had turned it into another story to throw off any tiny potential clues, though he didn't think he had to be too careful tonight as there was going to be nothing left of his victim when he was finished.

He was getting a strange thrill out of the conversation. It made him feel awesome, invincible, to be standing before someone who was so paranoid, and have him not know that he was face to face with the very killer he feared. He thought briefly about waiting until closing time and having the shop assistant as his next victim, but he thought about the fact that he was meant to be at a party and if the assistant saw him hanging around he would no doubt call the Garda and that would be Conán doomed to discovery.

Conán instead returned to the flat and had some whiskey to calm the nerves he always got before a killing. He always got bad nerves, terrified of being caught. He wasn't ready to be caught. He may have gone through a tough time but now he had his right mind back, he just wanted to get back to doing the only true thing that made him feel totally happy. The power and sense of control he had when he killed someone made him briefly feel content with his own life, made him forget about the lack of control he had over his own life, past, present, and future. He knew he was heading on a downward spiral and he knew he couldn't' stop himself, but all he could do was sit back and fall with it.

*

Conán had been ten and his mother had been passed out on the bed upstairs when he had caught sight of it. The child looked around himself with a mixture of fear and excitement, before he reached up for the half empty bottle of whiskey and looked at it, smiling slightly.

"I wonder what she sees in this stuff anyway?" he muttered to himself, tipping the bottle to his mouth and taking a sip. He gagged instantly – the liquid seared his throat and made his eyes water, but the warm feeling it left in his stomach was comforting, and Conán thought about risking taking another sip. He was feeling a little rebellious today – he had reached the stage where he didn’t care what happened to him, and so he gradually got through the rest of the whiskey and was pretty drunk when the front door opened and some familiar footsteps came in. Conán froze.

His mother's current boyfriend had staggered into the room, his pupils telling the young boy that he was doped out, no doubt on heroin.

"Where's your mother?" he slurred. Conán hoped that the man wouldn't realise that he himself was pretty out of it, and he did his best not to stagger or slur when he replied.

"She's upstairs," he said, thinking he had done quite well. Even if he hadn't, the boyfriend didn't notice.

"Doing what?"

"I dunno. She's sleeping, probably."

"Lazy bitch," the boyfriend muttered. He and Conán's mother were very much in a love-hate relationship. He disappeared out of the kitchen, only to return a few seconds later, looking agitated.

"What?" Conán asked.

"What are you doing in here anyway?"

"I'm tidying up."

"You're up to no good, I bet."

"I'm not up to anything."

"Your mother was right about you. I could tell you were a bad egg from the moment I saw you. You know how lucky you are that she kept you. If I'd been her it would have been a home, or a barrel of water."

"Don't make me laugh," the boy said cheekily, the whiskey making him bolder. "She hates me."

"And is it any wonder? You ruined her life."

"I didn't ask to be born. It was her who got knocked up because she was some slut."

The words were out of Conán's mouth before he could stop himself, and he saw the boyfriend's face light up in glee. Conán paled and groaned.

"Oh-ho. She's going to like hearing this."

"Don't you dare!"

"I'm going to go up right now."

"There's no point, she'll be out for the count."

"I'm sure she'll wake up at the excuse to beat on you."

He turned to go up the stairs. Out of sheer desperation, Conán leapt at his back and the two fought it out furiously for a few minutes. Conán was only little and skinny, but he was also drunk and angry, and the boyfriend was sluggish from the drugs and soon pushed the boy away, not being bothered to carry on the fight anymore.

"Whatever," he muttered, his eyes even more unfocused and his slurring worse. "I can't be arsed anyway."

Conán didn't leave from his position on guard until he was sure that the boyfriend was asleep, and then he carried on drunkenly cleaning the kitchen. It was a lot more fun when drunk, and Conán decided that he wouldn't ever sober up again if he had the chance. He knew he would be in trouble when his mother found out, but the haze of whiskey clouding his thoughts blocked any bad things from entering his mind, and he blissfully told himself that everything would work out, no worries.

The next thing he knew, he was waking up on the kitchen floor, his fingers and toes numb and his head throbbing. He sat up slowly and groaned. Leaning against the kitchen cupboards, he realised what had happened quickly and then he dragged his eyes up fearfully, expecting to see his mother standing above him with a grin on her face that told Conán he was going to be punished terribly.

There was no one there. Conán could hardly believe his luck. He crept upstairs, getting used to feeling so wobbly, and peered into her bedroom. The bedroom was a tip, the bed simply a mattress on the floor with dirty clothes thrown all over it and his mother still sleeping somewhere in the middle of it all. Used syringes littered the bedroom floor. Conán never went in there for fear of standing on one and it getting infected, or worse, him catching something awful like AIDS. Who knew where those needles had been? His mother had so many people over that any person in the city could have used them.

Conán went back downstairs to see what the boyfriend was doing. Knowing him, he would still be sleeping too. Peering into the living room, Conán saw that he was indeed sprawled out on the sofa, completely still, unaware of what was going on. Conán watched him for a while, not knowing why, but knowing enough to know that there was something wrong in leaving him. The sense of dread growing, he crept into the room and picked his way through empty food cartons and alcohol bottles, over to where the man lay on the sofa.

"Here!" he said, shaking the older male. "Wake up!"

He realised what was wrong then and there. The man was cold, and very much stiff. He was dead.

Conán had frozen, looking down at the man's body with a mixture of horror and excitement. He had always wondered what it would be like to stumble across a dead body, to be the first person to interrupt the calm state of death, to be alone with someone who was no longer of this world.

Conán reached out and touched the man's face. If it weren't for the temperature of his skin, and the fact that he was too still, Conán would have thought he had been sleeping. He looked calm, and Conán guessed that the drugs had got him while he had been passed out in a stupor. The most fascinating thing for Conán had been that fact that, in the man's limp hand, he was still holding a half empty bottle of beer. Conán was taken back to the thoughts he had, nearly every waking moment of his life, about killing somebody. His mother, of course, would be the main prize, but he was getting to the stage where he wanted to kill someone – anyone – who got in his way, who annoyed him in the slightest, who tried to belittle or bully him. He had already had enough of being belittled and bullied.

Conán's hand drifted to the man's throat. He pressed his hand against it, imagining that he had killed the man, playing that he had strangled him and the man was dead because of Conán's own actions. He felt strangely excited by the thought, and there were butterflies in his stomach as he toyed with the idea. He put his other hand on the man's throat as well, applying slightly more pressure, almost getting himself to believe the game …

Something clanked in the house somewhere. A pipe, perhaps? Whatever it had been had shocked Conán out of his fantasy and threw him with a startling and unwelcome jolt back into the real world. Conán didn't want to come back to the real world. He had liked where he had been.

However, the unwelcome jolt had put another idea into his mind. His mother had been out with this man the night before, before she had got home and gone upstairs, screeching at Conán to get the place tidied up. Conán knew that, of she had been out, she had probably been off doing drugs somewhere, so what was to say she hadn't taken a bad lot like the man currently lying dead on the sofa? His heart beating fast due to apprehension and excitement, Conán crept up the stairs and risked going into his mother's room, watching where he put his feet carefully.

Conán had stood over her bed for a while, squinting through the pile of clothes to where he knew his mother would be sprawled, waiting to see any movement. He couldn't see any, and his hopes rose up even higher. What if she were dead? He would be free! He would never have to put up with her again!

Praying to a God he wasn't sure was listening; Conán crouched down beside his mother and twitched the clothes and covers away. She was lying quite still, and the flutter of excitement in Conán's chest rose a little more, only to die and come crashing to the pit of his stomach when he saw she was breathing ever so slightly. But perhaps that mean she would die soon? Perhaps she was in the process of dying, and if Conán walked out of the room now and left her and pretended that he didn't see anything … perhaps when he came up at teatime she would be dead?

Something stopped Conán from moving. A thought had crossed his mind that filled him with both fear and excitement. His mother was either unconscious or deeply asleep. She wouldn't notice if Conán was to just put his hands around her throat, would she?

Conán was going to do it. He had decided enough was enough. He was going to do it. If the police turned up, he would blame it on the boyfriend, or someone else … anything else. Who would suspect the little ten year old who was crying for his mother, anyway?