When You Wake up and Scream

Naoise sat on the sofa quietly, watching Conán. He was sitting beside her, looking as though he was about to doze off at any minute. He had been released from hospital that morning, and Naoise was terrified to leave him.

Conán yawned and shook himself.

"I’m gonna get … coffee," he muttered tiredly. "Want one?"

"If you’re making," Naoise replied softly. Conán stood up shakily and went to the kitchen. ‘How’s your head?’ Naoise added.

"It’s all right. A bit sore, but it’s to be expected."

"I can’t believe you did it."

"Well, I did."

"Why, Conán? Do you really feel as though you have nothing to live for?"

"I wasn’t thinking straight. I was drunk."

"You told me you loved me. Did you love me then?"

"Yes. I’ve loved you for a while."

"But you would have still killed yourself?"

"I didn’t know you loved me back until the hospital."

"Did I not make it clear?"

"I wasn’t thinking straight," Conán said again, even though it wasn’t a legitimate excuse.

"Well, you need to learn to think straight. I do love you, and you would break my heart if you ever did anything like that to yourself."

Conán sighed as the kettle boiled. There was a haunting sadness in his sigh. Naoise came up behind him and put her arms around his waist. He turned and held her to him, resting his chin on her head.

"There are more things I could do to break your heart."

"I can’t think of any better way to do it than kill yourself. Conán, you can make something of yourself. I know you can, if you would only try. You’ve got me; you’ll always have me. I’m not going to go anywhere; I’ll always be here when you need me. You need to get yourself away from the past and look to your future."

"What future?"

"A future without your mother, that’s what, Conán. A future where she doesn’t exist, where you’re free and you never have to see her face or hear her voice ever again. A future where you can make something of yourself if you try, a future with me. Does that not sound good? Would you prefer to kill yourself and lie underground for the rest of eternity?"

"Naoise," Conán looked her in the eye. "One day you’ll understand, I guarantee it. But for now you’ll have to trust me when I say I have no future."

"Why?" Naoise demanded. "If you’re so sure, why?"

"I couldn’t be clear. I’ve made mistakes that I’ll never be able to go back on."

"Like what?"

"That’s not for you to know right now."

"Conán, who are you?"

Naoise was standing in front of him now, her green eyes holding a blazing look which Conán had never seen before. They demanded the truth. Knowing he couldn’t give it to her, Conán turned away, pouring the water into the coffee.

"Conán!"

Naoise grabbed him and pulled him to face her. Conán spilt the water over one hand and it scalded him badly. Naoise looked horrified for a split second, but Conán didn’t react in any way to the pain. She looked at him as though he wasn’t human. Conán would never forget the look.

"I don’t know who I am, Naoise," Conán said softly. "And I don’t think I ever will."

Naoise, feeling cold all of a sudden, took Conán’s hand and held it under the cold tap. He didn’t move, only watched the water pouring over his hand, cooling the reddening skin.

"You’re different to when you were younger, Conán," she told him softly. "You don’t have to be pushed around anymore. You’re not a child, and she’s not here. You can find yourself."

"I’ve never been myself."

"You have to find yourself! Conán, you can’t go through life like this, you –"

"You’re right. I can’t go through life like this, and that’s why I tried to end it. Perhaps you understand now?"

"Do I mean anything to you?"

"You mean everything to me."

"So why would you still do that?"

"Because I want to protect you."

"Protect me? From what?"

"I would never want you to find out. Never."

They were silent while they drank their coffee. It wasn’t an awkward silence, but neither was it comfortable. Conán never looked up once, but Naoise glanced at him every so often, wondering what in the world she could do to help him. She was beginning to feel that he had gone too far out of her reach now, and she was beginning to sense the despair that told her he was already beyond her help.

"Look at that," Conán said suddenly, softly, nodding at the television screen. The news was still on, and it had the time and date running in the corner.

"What?" Naoise asked. The clock showed 0.00 – the beginning of a new day.

"I’m twenty-one," Conán said quietly. Naoise thought about wishing him a happy birthday, but she didn’t think that it was relevant.

"How does it feel?" she said eventually, a weak attempt at comedy. Conán gave a small laugh.

"Much the same, to be honest," he smiled.

"We’ll have to get you a cake."

"What, and congratulate me on living another year?"

"Why not?"

Conán managed another small smile.

"My birthday was never a big thing, as you can imagine. You don’t have to do anything at all, you can just ignore it."

"I couldn’t do that. It’s your birthday," Naoise frowned suddenly. "To think you might not have been here to see it."

"Would it have been a bad thing?"

"It’s always a bad thing when someone doesn’t think they can live anymore. Don’t let her win, Conán."

Don’t let her win. Conán thought that perhaps, in a way, she already had.

*

Conán spent his first day of being twenty-one with Naoise, which was still the best birthday present he had ever had. It was awful when she eventually had to leave. She thought she had been safe, as she had left her mobile phone behind in Cork in her hurry to get to Conán’s side at the hospital, but her mother had found it and rang Conán’s number, demanding that her daughter came back.

"I got the whole lecture," Naoise sighed, as she found her shoes. "The whole, 'This is meant to be a family holiday, we’re not a family when you’re in Dublin, you’re being selfish, get back here, stop ruining everything, quit running off, act your age, what business do you have with this Conán anyway …'. I’m fed up of it. I have half a mind to stay here just to spite her."

Conán managed a smile. He was smiling a little more now, but Naoise wondered if he would stop once she had left.

"You’re quite welcome to, if you want to frustrate her further. Tell her I kidnapped you."

"I wouldn’t do that to you. That psychopathic detective follows you around enough."

"Oh?" Conán cocked one eyebrow up. "So he’s psychopathic now?"

"Of course he is," Naoise linked her arms around Conán’s waist where they stood, standing so she was facing him. Conán held her to him. "I never apologised for all that, did I?"

Conán kissed her gently.

"You don’t need to. I didn’t help myself."

"Well, I was wrong. It couldn’t have been you, could it? He doesn’t have a leg to stand on now, not since that murder happened when you were in the hospital. Seems to me that you were right after all, and all they wanted was a likely scapegoat."

"Poor old Sherlock will have to find another one now, eh?" Conán chuckled, and Naoise laughed as well.

"I’ll be back as soon as I can, all right? Please, Conán, for the love of God, don’t do anything stupid."

"I’ll try not to."

"No, you won’t."

"I’ll do what I can, Naoise."

She looked at him with those beautiful green eyes of hers. Conán knew he couldn’t do it as long as this girl loved him. He sighed and hugged her again.

The flat was eerily silent once she had left. He traced her footsteps, down the stairs and outside and away up the street until all he could hear were the cars in the distance and someone’s washing flapping in the wind down the road. He sat on his bed and looked at the two skulls that were still sitting, seemingly innocently, on his bedside cabinet. Naoise had seen them, but he had spun the same sort of story as he had told Detective McAfee, obviously leaving out the part about their being hers. He was thankful for his decision for a decoy murder, as she had accepted the story about the skulls.

Conán put his head on one side slightly, as he surveyed them. Steve’s skull was a little bigger than Tom’s. It looked slightly lopsided. It would look better if there was another Tom-sized head to even things out.

Conán went out of the prowl that night, for the first time, he thought to himself, since turning twenty-one. He wondered if it would feel any different, and smiled thinly. Not likely. It would feel the same as it did when he had been seventeen and he had murdered that prostitute. It would still feel awesome in his eyes.

He decided to commemorate his aging one year by trying a different technique. He was fully aware by now of the fact that it would be increasingly difficult to just get a victim to come back home with him, so he decided to go for the sympathy vote. Naoise, when talking about some of the other serial killers she had studied, had given him the impression that the sympathy factor could work quite well, depending on how realistic you were.

It was simple in the end. When he spotted his likely victim (he was looking at head sizes, if he was honest with himself. He could roughly estimate what size their skull would be, and he soon got a match for Tom’s) he suddenly developed a realistically painful looking limp, and succeeded in getting the other man to help him get up the stairs to his flat. It had been easy from that point after. He had unlocked the door while Conán held onto the doorframe, grimacing with what the other man must have thought was crippling pain, and once the door was open Conán had made his miraculous recovery and shoved the man as hard as he could into the flat, where he had beaten him unconscious with the lamp on the table and tied him to the table leg.

"It’s a shame, isn’t it?" Conán asked him softly, when he began to stir. "You try to be nice to people and you keep on getting screwed over. I bet you wish you’d just shoved me over and robbed me now, eh?"

"You’re the worst kind of evil, you know that?"

"I know that."

"So you’re that crazy bastard who’s running around Dublin?"

Conán slashed him across the cheek with the knife he would later use to get rid of the evidence.

"Don’t call me that," he hissed dangerously.

"Someone has issues!"

Conán laughed, knowing the other man was only being brave because he was so scared.

"Really? I have issues? I always thought this sort of thing was normal, what do you know? You learn something new everyday."

"So you know it’s not normal?"

"Well, killing isn’t exactly what you average Joe would do, is it?"

"Wow. I thought you would be off your head crazy. You know, thinking it was right."

"Of course it’s not right."

"So why do you do it?"

"Because I enjoy it. And face it, a lot of what we do because we enjoy isn’t right."

"I don’t think that this is on the same level as binge drinking or junk food."

"Well, in my eyes it is."

"Perhaps you are crazy. I mean, you would have to be, really, wouldn’t you? Who else would leave severed limbs on street corners?"

"Looking forward to it?"

"What part of me will you be leaving, then?"

"Well, I would say your head, but I need that. I would say perhaps the torso this time, I haven’t done that before. That all right with you?" Conán sniggered.

"Oh yeah," the other man said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "That’s perfectly fine with me, you crack on."

"Merci." Conán laughed.

He watched the other man for a while, watching the blood make its way down his face. Conán was fascinated by the blood. It stood out so harshly against the man’s pale skin.

"What’s your name, eh?" he asked his victim.

"Why do you care?"

"I don’t particularly care, I just want to know."

A pause.

"Aidan."

"Aidan. I used to know a guy called Aidan. He made my life a living Hell at school."

"Oh really?"

"Yeah. Aidan McMahon, his name was," Conán paused and looked at him closely. "That’s your name, isn’t it?"

Conán had been sure from the moment he had laid eyes on him. Aidan clicked as well.

"Jesus Christ," he muttered, sounding half horrified and half amazed. "You’re Conán Connolly, aren’t you?"

"Yes, I am. Miss me?"

"Hell no! We had you pinned for a crazy bastard from the moment we saw you. You know what we used to say about you? We used to say, 'He looks like the type of guy who’d grow up to be a serial killer.' By Hell, we were right."

"Yeah, you were right. How does it make you feel, eh? To think, all of those days I took your crap and now look at you. What are you going to do now? There’s nothing you can do, you’ll have to feel as helpless as I felt for all those years of my life!"

"You always were a nutter, Connolly. Ever since I first laid eyes on you I knew you would be a nutter. Is it any surprising, really? I mean, look at that so-called family of yours. We all used to marvel at how you were an only child. Your mother must have slept with the whole of Dublin."

"You can slag that bitch off as much as you want, she’s dead and gone now and I always hated her."

"Hated her, yeah, but you were terrified of her. Remember when they finally got her down the school that time because you were fighting with another kid? I thought you were going to pee yourself when she walked in through the door. It was the funniest thing that I ever saw. What did she do to you? Stick you on a mop handle and wipe the floor which your face?"

The knife came at him faster than he could react – within seconds Conán had pushed it deep into his stomach. Aidan doubled over in agony and Conán twisted it sharply.

"You shut your face," he hissed dangerously. "You can shut up right now, I’m sick of your crap! You never learned how to shut the Hell up, did you? Never learnt how to let things go, you always had to have the last word!"

Conán pulled the knife out and then pushed it back in somewhere else.

"Well, have the last freakin’ word to this, hey?"

"What’s it going to achieve?" Aidan muttered through clenched teeth. "Do you think it’ll make everything better? Do you think it’ll change things? Do you think dear old Mummy will come back and love little Conán again? Because you’ve only ruined the life you could have had!"

Conán was angry because, deep down, he knew Aidan was right. Conán would make sure Aidan would never be right again, and he abandoned the knife in favour of his own hands. Despite the anger running through him with such strength that he had a headache and he felt physically ill, he enjoyed choking the life out of one of his old tormenters. It was a little slice of revenge that he had missed out when his mother had escaped him.

He used the anger productively once Aidan was down, using it to efficiently start getting rid of the evidence and store the parts in the freezer. He would dispose of them properly in the morning; he didn’t want to risk being seen out when Aidan, for all he knew, could have already been reported missing. He kept the head out, though, and worked on that while he was still angry and wanted something to do with his hands. He didn’t think he could bear looking at Aidan McMahon’s face the next day. When he was finished, he was left with a nice, clean skull to go with Steve and Tom.

"Aidan," he muttered. "You’re the only one with your real name. You should be honoured."

He looked down at his bloody hands. Time to get cleaned up.