When You Wake up and Scream

Innocent until proven guilty. There was plenty of proof at the moment, if Detective McAfee had burst into the flat at that very moment in time. Conán had only just killed his latest victim – it was so soon after the murder, in fact, that he was still crouched over the body, holding onto his throat to make absolutely sure that no life remained.

When he was sure the man was dead, Conán let himself slump back onto the floor, his back against the sofa, and he took a swig from his bottle of Vodka. He was trembling slightly, knowing that every day the killing was getting riskier, and all the while knowing that he couldn't stop. He enjoyed it too much. It was the only thing he knew. Ever since he was young he had slipped into daydreams about killing somebody, and now he was living the dream. He was doing what he always wanted to do, even though his mother had frequently told him that all dreams were worthless, that he would never amount to anything, that he would spend the rest of his life unloved and alone.

Well, between Steve and Tom, he would never be alone again.

Conán wandered around the quiet house, looking into all of the rooms and wondering what was going on. The two-year-old could have sworn that he had heard his mother getting in that night. He looked around the house again. No one was there. All the doors were locked. The place was silent. Nothing stirred.

Conán had stood at the top of the stairs, his little body trembling with the cold, and his thumb in his mouth. The heating wasn't on. It hardly ever was. The electricity didn’t work. Conán had tried it, lifting his little hand to a lamp in his mother's room. Nothing. Conán was scared of the dark, and the dark was falling fast. It seemed only moments ago that he had woken in the bath, but now the light was failing and the night was filling the sky.
He began to cry. He never thought that he would want his mother, but the house was so quiet and empty and he was scared.

"Mummy!" the little boy sobbed. "Mummy, I'll be good if you come back Mummy! Mummy!"
Two little hands beat against the stair railings in fear and frustration. The wind howled outside the dark house and the boy's frightened cries got louder.

His mother had returned, three days later, to find the child half dead with the fear. He had been curled up in the bath, sucking his thumb so furiously that it had begun to wrinkle, his brown eyes wide and glittering through the dark. He remained motionless when she came into the room, his face never changing from a mask of fear all the while.

"What are you looking at?" she demanded of him. He continued to tremble, mute. "Answer me, you little brat!"

She had grabbed him by the hair and shook him to try and get him to stop sucking his thumb, but he hadn't stopped, and he still didn’t speak.

"Oh, I see!" she hissed, chuckling softly. "Is poor ickle Conán all fwightened? Does he not like being all by his little self? Well, newsflash, boy! Life sucks! You'd better get used to being alone because no soul would ever love you, least of all your own mother!"

She flung him back into the bathtub. Conán curled up into foetal position again, but that was the only movement he made. He remained mute; staring into the darkness long after his mother had left the room.

Conán felt himself shudder at the memory. The flat was dark now, the curtains closed, but he wasn't alone. He huddled up to the dead man on the floor, resting his head against the arm, which was flung out against the ground. He sighed and closed his eyes. His mother was wrong. He would never have to be alone again.

*

"Garda officers were called to yet another grisly scene earlier this morning with the discovery of more body parts showing up in Dublin, though in a different area to where the previous ones were discovered. Only two days ago, the severed legs of twenty-two year old Gerald Doyle were discovered in a Dublin side street. This time, it was a pair of arms that were found, and the victim is believed to be thirty-year-old Mark McCarthaigh, who was reported missing less than twenty-four hours ago. Detective Cillian McAfee says that there is no doubt about the fact that this is the work of what he called a 'sadistic serial killer, who enjoys playing games with the law and terrifying innocent citizens'."

Naoise sighed heavily as the story ended on the news. She was still livid about the fact she had spent three hours being questioned at the police station, but she had deliberately avoided seeing Conán again before she returned to Cork, as she knew she would have probably started to yell at him and say something she regretted. That mean he had spent the night unattended, and suddenly a body, or part of it, had shown up on the street corner.

She closed her eyes, biting her bottom lip softly as she did when she was thinking. The only thing she could hope was that if it was Conán, he would be stopped sooner rather than later. The Garda seemed very interested in him, and Naoise knew that now they were onto him, Conán wouldn't be able to get away with what he was doing for much longer. She decided to ring him now, however, as she was scared that he might have done himself harm if he thought she had fallen out with him.

He sounded in a bad enough mood when he picked up the phone.

"What?"

"That's a nice hello, Conán."

"Oh. It's you."

"It's me?"

"Are you not still in a mood with me?"

"Like you weren't in a mood with me!"

"Well, I'm not surprised! The things you were accusing me of –"

"I was taken in by the police yesterday."

"You – what?"

"They wanted to ask me about you."

"Well, what did you tell them?"

"The truth."

"That you think I'm a murderer?"

"No, not exactly. They were just asking about you. Your personality and your habits, that sort of thing."

"Oh, and I supposed you painted them a picture of this psychopathic loner who's stuck in the past?"

"That's what you are, isn't it?" Naoise fired back.

"That's charming. I think I'll hang up now."

"Conán, no! I don't want us falling out!"

"Well, you're showing it in a pretty funny way."

"You are acting suspicious, though."

Conán sighed heavily.

"Naoise, please. You're all I have. If you start suspecting me, I'm going to go mental. I'm not a murderer, I'm just an alcoholic. There's a huge difference. I'm acting weird because I ran out of alcohol and I get cranky when I don't have drink. I sounded weird the other day because I had a really bad hangover and a crappy night's sleep, so I was tired and I had this headache and my boss had told me there was no work again, and talking on the phone was something I didn't feel like doing. As for the whole wrong-number incident, I think you should let it go, as I had been awake for about three seconds."

There was something in Conán's voice that made Naoise suddenly want to hug him.

"Look," she said softly. "I'm just so worried about you. You'll get yourself into trouble someday. That detective guy said he wants to see you again, and so he'll probably be around seems they have your name and address on file. You may be innocent, but you're certainly giving them the wrong idea."

"They'll be round again?" Conán asked, anger evident in his words.

"Yes, probably."

"For crying out loud –"

"Just, if they do, behave yourself! They're looking for someone!"

"Well, they'll arrest me and the murders will continue and they'll look like idiots, won't they?"

"Unless the murderer thinks that's pretty funny and moves away, leaving you with the burden and a similar spate of murders start up in England or America or somewhere? Even if that proved your innocence, you'd most likely still waste thirty years of your life behind bars."

"Thirty years of my life less to live."

"Don’t talk like that, Conán, you break my heart when you do."

"Ah, come on, Naoise, you know I wouldn't really do anything like that to you. Anyway, I don't know of any killers who did that."

"They'd probably think it was hilarious."

"I don't know why they're bothering up at the police station, to be honest. Old Sherlock was talking to me for ages about all these killers who had gotten away with it for years, and they slipped up themselves. I felt like saying; if they all slipped up themselves, why bother trying to catch them? Why not just wait for them to mess up?"

"Because it puts pressure on them," Naoise explained. "Sometimes the slip up is caused due to panic or stress. They leave a clue in their hurry, or a victim manages to escape. The more their way of working is advertised, their modus operandi, the more people can try and get round them. For instance, say the motivation is loneliness? The to-be-victim can pretend to be a friend, assure the killer he or she won't leave, and lure them into a false sense of security until they see a chance to escape."

"That's not a very nice thing to do."

"It's what brought Jeffrey Dahmer down."

"Feel bad for him."

"I shouldn't. There were seventeen other victims before the other guy escaped."

"Wow, he was on a roll. How did he get away with it for so long anyway?"

"He just disposed of the bodies really well. Until the end, where they were just lying all over the place. But he cracked up, he slipped up. He could have gone on for years more if he had kept a clear head. The neighbours soon noticed the place stinking up as well."

"Should have froze them."

"He did. Some pieces, anyway. He left bodies in the bath and stuff, too, though. But he used to strip the flesh off the body parts and keep the bones. He had two whole skeletons and three skulls, something like that."

"How the Hell do you strip the flesh of someone?"

"Acid," Naoise shrugged. "Or you could boil it off. That's what he did. He boiled the heads on the stove."

"Weird. And you're saying I'm as psychopathic as that?"

"No! I'm not saying anything. You asked."

"That I did. Well, now I've been scarred for life by the knowledge of Naoise, we shall move on."

Conán's mood had improved greatly by the time he got off the phone to Naoise, as he now had a plan to get out of his worrying situation. He had suspected that the police might not leave him alone, and if they came to his flat he knew they would probably search it. So, he would have to get rid of the body parts in the freezer, but obviously there was the slight problem of Steve and Tom. He couldn't part with them, but he knew he couldn't leave them in the freezer. He had checked on them earlier, and although Tom was still in pretty good condition, Steve was beginning to look strange. Naoise, without realising it, had given him the answer to his problem.

Around two and a half hours later, Conán could be found standing by the sink, grimacing slightly, having to use his bare hands to work the flesh that was still sticking to the bone away. The smell was less than pleasant, but now the old biddy downstairs had kicked the bucket, Conán didn’t really have to worry too much about it. He just hoped that he didn't get a visit from the police now, because the smell would be very hard to disguise. Soon, he was left with two perfect and fully in tact skulls. He looked at them sitting on the draining board, the sun making them gleam whiter. He smiled to himself.

"It was necessary, lads," he told them. "Especially you, Steve. You were starting to look a bit of a state."

He could tell them apart easily. Steve had obviously been in some sort of accident or fight when he had been alive, as the bone on the back of his head showed evidence of being cracked and then healed over.

Conán spent a little longer washing them under the tap, and then he hid them at the back of his chest of drawers in his bedroom, burying them under some clothes he hardly ever wore as though tucking them into bed. Then he spent the best part of the day making the flat what he liked to call police-proof, airing out the smell left from boiling the heads and driving back out to the forest to dump the rest of the body parts, and finally, when he got back, cleaning out the freezer in case there was any evidence in there, and going over the bath and the knife again to make sure that there were without a doubt perfectly clean.

When he was finally finished, he looked around the flat, marvelling at how close to normality it now was. If it wasn’t for the two skulls in his bedroom, he thought, no one would know that anything sinister was occurring. He wondered about when they would stop occurring. He knew he didn't want to stop, deep down he never wanted to stop, but he was worrying about the fact that sometimes he wouldn't want to continue. They were only brief flashes in his mind, but he knew that if he let that tiny piece of him have a say, he would destroy himself with the guilt. He had to continue – he felt worse when he tried to restrain the urge.

He remembered how life had been for that year when he had been nineteen, when he hadn't killed anyone. He remembered the guilt he had felt over the previous two deaths, and he remembered keeping himself inside this same small flat for weeks on end, terrified that if he went out someone would cross his path and he would murder them. He had nearly driven himself insane with the urge to kill, and finally that dream about his mother had pushed him over the edge. Killing that first guy with the knife had been the best feeling he had ever experienced, apart from maybe the feeling he got when he opened the door or answered the phone and it was Naoise. It still frightened him, however, that when he searched into himself, he knew he currently enjoyed the killing more than he enjoyed being with Naoise.

It was a different kind of enjoyment, he said to himself, reasoning with himself. It was like the love parents have for their child, and the love that they had for each other. The two were essentially the same, but impossible to compare as they were so different. Perhaps he loved Naoise as much as he loved killing, but didn't realise it as they were different types of love. Was it possible to love a human as much as killing? Conán didn't think so.