When You Wake up and Scream

"What do you think of that, then, eh?" Conán asked Gerald. "A serial killer in Dublin! Not what you'd expect, is it?"

Gerald shook his head slowly, and Conán got the feeling that he was beginning to realise his situation.

"You'd have to be one crazy bastard," he muttered.

"There are a lot of crazy bastards out there," Conán said calmly, taking a sip of whiskey. He noted that Gerald jumped slightly when Conán moved his arm. Conán smiled into his glass. "The trouble is," he continued softly. "You never know who they are."

Gerald was looking at him now, with wide eyes. Conán knew that he didn't have to be casual anymore.

"How many do you think your man's killed, Gerald?"

"Well … there's those two teenagers, so that's two … then there's the guy in the house which is three, and then the dude who got his throat slit, which is four if it was him –"

"It was."

"Right," Gerald looked increasingly uncomfortable. "So, er … four … then … and another homeless guy … I don't know. About six?"

Conán laughed cheerily.

"Try ten."

"Ten?"

"Yeah, ten."

"How … how do you know?"

"Come on, have you not worked it out yet?" Conán asked softly, looking at Gerald intensely. Gerald looking into Conán's brown eyes, and it was then, at that moment, that he saw it. He saw the burning madness in them, the many other pairs of eyes that had stared at the same awesome, terrifying sight before they saw nothing else at all. He saw the hatred, and he saw the despair, and he saw the fear, and he saw the excitement all in one. The eyes were exactly how someone would picture the eyes of killer, and it was a spectacular sight, though Gerald knew that, now, they would most likely be the last spectacular sight he would ever see.

"It's you," he said, simply, dully.

"I'm sorry," Conán said softly.

"What do you mean, you're sorry? If you're so sorry, stop doing it."

"I can't," Conán smiled thinly. "You don't know what it's like. It's an addiction. It's the thing that drives you and it's the thing that destroys you. You can't live without it, but you can't exist with it, either. It's … well, never mind. You'd never understand. You're not like us."

"I'm normal, you mean!" Gerald spluttered, looking at Conán with a mixture of revulsion and horror. The look angered Conán. He narrowed his eyes.

"Who are you to decide what's normal and what's not?" he demanded, his voice harsh.

"You think murder is normal?"

"It all depends on what you know!"

"Well, I know that murder is in no way normal!"

"You'd be a filthy liar if you said you never had the urge to kill somebody before."

"The urge, perhaps, but that's the difference between you and me, isn't it? You're too weak to say no!"

Conán flew at him with the empty whiskey bottle and smashed it over his head with such force that the bottle splintered and shattered. Gerald, who had been halfway through jumping out of the way, crumpled to the floor, his eyes open but glazed. His breathing was raspy and Conán could see several pieces of glass embedded in his skin. Trembling, Conán let the neck of the bottle fall to the floor. He was scared. Never had he felt complete and total rage like that before. It scared him … scared him to think that there was that amount of violence lurking in him. Sure, he had hit people before, but never like that … never so hard that he embedded half a bottle into someone's head.

He quickly crouched down beside Gerald and put his hands around the man's throat, but before he could get a decent grip the other man seemed to come to himself again, and he began to kick and hit out at Conán, catching him in the stomach with his fist, Winded, Conán doubled over and Gerald scrambled for the door. Conán quickly looked around himself and grabbed the nearest thing to him when he jumped up, which happened to be the frying pan that had just been washed and was sitting on the kitchen counter waiting to be put away. It wasn't the best weapon, but it would have to do. Under no circumstances could Conán allow Gerald to get away.

Mustering all of his strength, Conán swung the frying pan at the back of Gerald's head. It made a dull clanging sound and succeeded in making Gerald stumble slightly, but it didn't knock him down like Conán had hoped. He hit him again, as hard as the last time, and then, all of a sudden, Conán felt the same rage run through him as had done only minutes earlier, and with one more swing Gerald was on the floor, but Conán didn't stop there. He didn’t know exactly what he did in those fifteen minutes of blackness, but when Conán came back to his senses, Gerald was lying sprawled out on his back and Conán was sitting on his chest with his hands tightly around Gerald's throat, shaking him so violently that his head kept hitting off the floor. As if this wasn't bad enough, Gerald was severely beaten and blood was pretty much everywhere in the vicinity.

Conán stumbled away, his heart hammering and his breathing heavy, horrified. He couldn't drag his eyes away from the scene in front of him. The man looked as though he'd been stabbed and run over by a car in Conán's eyes, never mind beaten. He glanced around for evidence of a knife, but he already knew that he hadn't used one. He looked down at his arms. The frying pan was no longer held in his hand, it was lying beside the body, and his arms were red where they had been gripped and were beginning to bruise. Conán realised that his last memory showed him that when he had hit Gerald, Gerald had fallen face down, but now he was on his back. He realised through grainy memory that Gerald had been fighting back, fighting for his life. Conán felt sick. He had beaten the poor guy to death with his bare hands.

This was a first for Conán. He was trembling and pale, wondering why he had killed his latest victim in the way he had. He had never beaten anyone to death before; he had only used that sort of violence to get them onto the floor, to stun them … never to kill them. He must have strangled Gerald at one point as he had come back to himself with his hands around the man's throat, but he couldn't remember for the life of him if Gerald had been conscious, or even alive, when he had started to batter his head against the floor.

Feeling as though he were in a daze, Conán forced himself to approach the body again, and grab the dead man under the arms. He would have to go properly. There was no way he could just dump this body, he was too badly beaten, unrecognisable … the evidence that this new serial killer was becoming worse.

Conán tried to work out where the rage had come from. It had obviously been suppressed, but surely he would have been away if he had been suppressing such rage? And not just any rage - rage that could cause him to cave in a man's head with his bare hands!

A terrible, awful, disturbing thought flashed into Conán's consciousness as quickly as it left. It wasn't rage … it was evil. The evil his mother had told him about. The evil that would send him to damnation.

"And where will you go when you die?"

"To Hell."

Conán's heart was thumping so hard that he was scared of the fact that if it didn't calm down, he would have a heart attack. He dragged Gerald's battered body into the bathtub and then slumped down onto the floor, burying his face in his hands and trembling worse than ever. He began to sob. He was scared. He was scared of himself, of what he could do.

He stumbled to his feet and back out into the kitchen, where, half blinded through tears, grabbed the knife that he used for cutting up the bodies. It, of course, was razor sharp, and Conán knew it would do the trick. Without stopping to pull his thoughts away from the fact that he needed to do this, the fact that he needed to sort everything out before more people died, he gripped the knife in both hands and turned it so the sharp blade was digging into his throat, just over the jugular, pressing into the skin so hard that one tiny jerk would slice into it. He flexed his fingers over the handle and gripped it as tight as he could, not wanting the knife to judder. He wanted it to be a nice, clean, deep cut. If he did it correctly, he would be unconscious in seconds and dead in minutes.

"Do it," he muttered to himself, and he closed his eyes and was just about to jerk his hands backwards and end it all when the phone rang, nearly causing him to cut himself by accident. He squeezed his eyes closed tighter, willing himself to ignore the phone. It wouldn't be important. It would be a salesperson. They never had anything interesting to say; never left messages … just do it.

"Come on," he muttered. "Come on, ignore it, just do it."

He repositioned his hand.

"Come on!"

The answering machine clicked.

It was Naoise.

Conán froze, the only movement his heavy breathing as he stood completely still, for a second almost mesmerised by her voice. She sounded worried about him.

"Ignore it! Just do it!" Conán yelled at himself, but his grip was faltering and he suddenly let the knife drop to the floor. It hit the kitchen tiles with a clatter.

"DAMN IT!" Conán screamed, and then he dived for the phone, snatching it up just as Naoise was about to hang up.

'Conán! About time!' Naoise sounded immensely relieved.

"Sorry … I was … er … I was sleeping," Conán muttered, not caring about how unconvincing he truly sounded.

"Are you all right, Conán?" Naoise asked, suspicion in her voice. "Actually, cut the crap, what's wrong?"

"Nothing, nothing … I've just woken up, I'm tired … it's still the morning, Naoise."

Conán's heart fluttered again as he realised that he had just killed two people within hours of each other.

"I know, but usually you're still up drinking at this time."

"It's early … you have a time difference or something?"

Naoise laughed.

"It's a hundred or so miles down the road, Conán, it's only Cork."

A hundred or so miles down the road. For a brief moment, the words gave him comfort and despair. A hundred or so miles sounded so much, but down the road sounded so close.

"Well, you know, I've never been good at common sense."

"You don’t sound too well, Conán. Will you please tell me what's wrong?"

"You'd be better off not knowing, dear," Conán sighed quietly, saying the words so softly that Naoise wondered if he had actually said them at all.

"Conán –"

"Look, Naoise, I'd really better go. I'm just sounding weird because I'm not feeling well, right? Hungover."

"Conán, please. What's wrong with you? You've not taken another turn, have you? Do you want me to come back? That's fine, I can get a train and I can be back by three, just give me a minute …"

"No, Naoise! You stay there; I'm fine, I promise. I said I'd ring you if there were a problem, but you rang me, so there's no problem, yeah? I'm fine, truly."

Naoise seemed a little comforted by Conán's words, but he sensed she still had suspicions, so he changed the subject, asking how everyone was.

"They're as mad as ever," Naoise replied. "I have another cousin though. A wee girl called Órlaith, she's really cute."

"Awh. Train her to steal chocolate for you."

Eventually someone called Naoise and she reluctantly had to go. Conán could sense her worry over him, and he felt guilty that she would be spending her holiday worrying about him. Although, it had to be said, he did need worrying about.

He walked back to where the knife was gleaming in the sunlight on the cold floor of the kitchen. He scooped it up with caution, as though it was an animal poised for attack.

"I'd better put you to good use," he said quietly, and he turned and carried it to the bathroom.