When You Wake up and Scream

Looking back, Conán would never be able to make sense of the following week, though he would always know that the accident which sent him to the hospital was the final error in his life, and that the events all spiralled from there. He would have probably gotten away with it if he hadn’t crashed his car, but he had crashed it, and this event was the one small thing that caused all of the bigger things to burst out of control and come out of nowhere, straight for him, and all he could do was try to dodge as many as he could while inside knowing all that time that it was useless.

It all happened quickly in reality, but in his mind the whole miserable charade was drawn out until it seems like years, each detail imprinted on his brain as though it had been carved in with a sharp knife. He had murdered the lad on the way back from the hospital, and he had gotten home and got drunk. That same night, he had lured another man back to his flat and strangled him in the kitchen. He had cut up the body and stored it in the freezer, and then he had finally fallen asleep as the sun began to rise. He had slept in late the next day and had got up at about two in the afternoon. Then he had gotten drunk again, and left the flat around half six. He walked for a few hours and snatched another man who was walking by himself. He had knocked him around the head and stunned him before pulling him off, and had very nearly been caught in the act. He had run pretty quickly out of there and had spent the rest of the night terrified of the knock on the door, but it never came. He had almost been disappointed. To take his mind off it, he cut up the body and stored the pieces in the freezer with the other victim.

Three victims in two days, and Conán knew that he was spiralling out of control, however he knew it wouldn’t stop him. The next day he got a phone call from Naoise, who was back at home. The news had no effect upon him. He went to meet her at Starbucks, and she had asked him what was wrong. He had told her everything was fine, but that he was a little sore because he had crashed his car. The decoy had worked, as she had been more worried about the fact he had been in a car accident than anything else.

"Are you sure that’s all that’s wrong?" she had asked him worriedly, before they had parted. Conán had deliberately avoided asking her to come back with him for a while, because by this point he was dangerous and unpredictable even to himself, and he was terrified he would turn on her and end up killing her. That was something he never wanted to do, though he knew that if he had to, he probably would. What was wrong with him?

"Conán?"

"What? Oh, I’m fine, my tooth’s giving me grief, that’s all, I gotta go, all right? Don’t come after me."

"Conán, what in -?"

"I gotta go!"

"What’s wrong with you?"

"I don’t feel well, all right … I don’t think – I feel like I’m gonna throw up."

Mary’s face when she saw the severed head. How scared she had been. Naoise crying when she told him her friend had been killed. Conán comforting her, lying to her … lying to the woman he was supposed to love.

Conán let out a cry and buried his face in his hands. Naoise watched him worriedly.

"Conán? Conán, what’s wrong with you?" she asked again, and Conán knew that she was only trying to help but she infuriated him all the same.

"Nothing’s wrong! Leave me alone, all right?"

"Are you sure you didn’t hit your head harder in that crash?"

Conán wished he had never mentioned the stupid crash. That stupid crash!

"No, I just want you to shut up about it! I’m fine! Leave me alone, yeah? You wouldn’t understand anyway!"

"Fine! I’m starting to wonder what I’m doing hanging about with you anyway! You’re the most annoying, selfish git I ever laid eyes on!"

They were both angry, and Conán’s arm twitched and for one horrible second, both of them thought Conán was going to strike her. Conán caught himself at the last minute, turned and walked away swiftly. Naoise remained behind, watching him retreat and torn between calling after him and abandoning him. She went home, walking away from him.

Conán watched her go, for a few moments possessed with the urge to run after her and throw her to the floor, and he knew what he would do then. He pulled himself away and sprinted home, arriving out of breath and with a stitch. His landlord’s daughter was glaring at him from over the road.

"What are ye looking at, ye auld bitch?" Conán spat at her, the hatred in his voice even surprising him. Her jaw dropped in disgust and she stormed back into the house, muttering curses to herself.

Petrified of himself to the point of being physically sick by this point, Conán had remained in his tiny flat for three days, not even getting within a metre of the door with all of the curtains closed. He had spent the entirety of the three days in a drunken stupor before, feeling as though he now had no control over himself anymore, he had lured a man who called himself Raymond back to his flat by using his limp excuse. Raymond had been killed almost as soon as the door had been closed behind him, and Conán had now run out of room in the freezer. He shoved the body parts in the fridge, knowing they wouldn’t keep but no longer caring. Conán hadn’t bothered cleaning up, his thoughts were too muddled and he didn’t have a clue what he was doing. He couldn’t rest, he couldn’t relax, and he could get no pleasure out of anything. Even killing had become another habit, just like eating, sleeping and breathing was. A necessary habit to live. Nothing more. Nothing else. Just necessary.

The next day had brought the same thing. This time he used his drunkenness to his advantage and caused such a pitiful scene, exaggerating his stumbling, until someone agreed to help him home. Conán spared himself the act of going over all of the details again, and the next thing he consciously thought about was how to fit all of the other body parts in the fridge. There was already a smell in there that wasn’t quite natural, but it wasn’t noticeable when the door closed yet.

The final day of the week passed in a drunken blur. Conán grabbed a person who was just walking past his flat, not really caring if he had been seen. He strangled him as soon as he pulled him into the flat, which was difficult as he was putting up a fight, but didn’t start cutting the body up for a while. Instead, he knelt on the floor next to it, still drinking heavily, and fighting back tears of despair. He didn’t want to do this anymore! Why couldn’t he stop?

"For the love of God!" Conán suddenly shouted, to no one in particular. "What am I doing? What’s going to happen?"

He stayed there for another long hour. Then, he stood up, and dragged the body towards the bathroom.

*

Naoise walked slowly along the street, wondering if she should go ahead with what she had planned. She knew she wanted to see Conán, but she didn’t know what she was going to say when she got there. She didn’t know if she was going to sit and talk to him, and try to work things out, and she didn’t know if he was going to open the door and she was just going to blurt out that she was breaking up with him. She had to think logically. She loved Conán, and she probably always would somewhere in her heart, but she was going back to University in a couple of day’s time and she didn’t know if she could cope with him as well as her ever-increasing assignments, lectures and experiments which were required for her Psychology course.

She was heading slowly up the stairs now, having second thoughts. If she didn’t know what she was going to say, why was she here? Why should she bother him when really she should be thinking things through? What if she blurted something out she wouldn’t say otherwise? Conán was an unstable guy at the moment, and she didn’t want to be the one who would put him over the edge, though deep down in her heart she knew that it was probable that someone would one day, and when that day came, no one would be around to help Conán out.

The door was open slightly, and Naoise froze on the spot. That wasn’t a good sign; it couldn’t be a good sign. She knocked on the door to let him know she was there, but there was no answer.

"Conán?" she asked timidly. "Conán, you in there?"

There was, again, no answer.

"Conán, I’m coming in, all right?"

No answer was as good as a yes in Naoise’s books, so she pushed the door open gently and cautiously stepped into the flat. The first thing that hit her was that the flat had acquired a strange smell, slightly bitter in the nostrils. The second thing that hit her was much more terrible, as she soon noticed that there was a lot of blood around the flat.

Naoise froze to the spot for the second time in less than a minute. She looked around herself, wondering what was the best thing to do. Should she go and call the police? She couldn’t, she didn’t even know if there was a serious problem yet. She was still deliberating when she spotted movement, in the form of a shadow, in the bathroom. Her feet barely touching the floor in her haste to quietly get over there, she edged towards the door.

It was one of those sights that would haunt you for the rest of your life, no matter how many therapists you saw or what you did to block it out. You could suppress it and you could ignore it in your waking hours, but it was one of those images that would creep up on you, as silent as a stalking cat, to haunt you in your sleeping hours, when you were unconscious, at your most vulnerable and unable to protect yourself. For a few horrible drawn-out seconds, Naoise couldn’t work out what she was looking at. She registered that the bathroom was the bloodiest place she had ever seen in her entire life, but she couldn’t for the life of her work out what Conán was crouched over until she recognised a severed head in the bathtub, and even then it didn’t make sense in her head. For a moment she thought she was dreaming, then she thought it was a joke, and then finally everything clicked into place and she realised that she had been right all along.

The realisation was a horrifying, betraying thing. Her breath caught in her throat in horror and she, once more, found herself unable to move, though this time it was through sheer shock. Naoise would never be able to find words to accurately describe what she felt as she watched the man she loved dismembering what had once been a human being with a family, and now was just unrecognisable chunks of meat, a product of one man’s sick achievements.

Finally her senses returned, and she still had enough of this sense left in her brain to realise that she was going to have to get out, and fast. She had found Dublin’s serial killer, and now she needed to get out alive. She took a cautious step backwards, and then she received the single most terrifying shock of her life.

"I don’t know where you think you’re going," Conán muttered from his position crouched on the floor, and his voice sounded strange, as though Conán wasn’t actually there. He stood up faster than Naoise could react and in seconds he had taken the few steps over to her and grabbed her wrist with one of his bloody hands, watching her with a gaze so intense that it made Naoise’s knees go weak and she found herself unable to scream even if she had one million chances.

"I didn’t want you to find out," Conán whispered. "I didn’t want you to know, because now I can’t let you leave."

Naoise had always thought, privately and naively, that she had read enough about serial killers to know how to act, and when she had been sixteen she had almost wished to find herself in this situation so she could prove the fact to herself and those who doubted her. Now, she realised that she had been stupid and ignorant, and she suddenly found herself harbouring an overwhelming respect for all of the people who had gotten out alive. She struggled to remember their actions and she looked into Conán’s crazed eyes.

"I won’t leave, Conán, not if you don’t want me to," she whispered hoarsely, forcing her voice to stay calm and without quaver.

"You know what that means."

"You don’t have to kill me. I’ll stay right here."

"No you won’t. This is why I never wanted you to know. I don’t want to kill you, Naoise, but I’m going to have to. I’ll make it quick, I promise."

Naoise changed tactics.

"Well … I guess if that’s what you think is best."

"Can you not see that it’s the only way?"

"I understand why. But do you want to go on, Conán? Just think … you could stop all this madness now. You could confess it all and live without this burden on your shoulders. You can still be saved."

"No one can save me, and no one can save you either. I’m sorry, Naoise, I really am."

Naoise put her hand on his, where he gripped her arm so tightly her fingers had gone numb. She squeezed it softly and looked into his eyes, and somewhere in them, Conán saw a flicker of something that made him loosen his grip for only a nanosecond, but Naoise seized the opportunity for all it was worth. She succeeded in pulling her arm away, and then she ran for it, heading for the door and praying that she would get away. She only had one chance, and she couldn’t waste it.

Conán was too quick and grabbed her again by the counter of the kitchen. Naoise screamed as loud as she could, praying someone would hear her. She grabbed the nearest thing to her right hand and swung it behind her, catching Conán across the forehead. He staggered backwards in pain – in a strange and ironic resemblance to the murder of Naoise’s best friend, he had been hit with an empty alcohol bottle. Naoise seemed to have remembered Mary, too, as her face suddenly twisted with rage.

"YOU SCHEMING BASTARD!" she screamed at him, and she had never screamed at anyone so loud in her life. Suddenly she wasn’t scared of him anymore, not when she thought of Mary and not when she thought of the way he’d lied to her, twisted her and manipulated her. She had even run to the very flat Mary had been killed in, crying, when she had found out.

She advanced on him, battering him with the bottle until it smashed. Conán was badly beaten and now cut by the glass shards, but he was also angered and knew that he couldn’t let Naoise get away. He was also roaring drunk, and possessed strength that he normally didn’t hold.

Feeling as though he was completely possessed by the intense anger that had overcome him, the same anger he had experienced before the brutal slaying of Gerald, he hit out at Naoise as she went for him again, catching her in the stomach and winding her badly. He took his change and tackled her to the ground, pinning her to the floor. She screamed with as much breath as she could find, and as he wrapped his hands around her throat and tightened his grip, she clawed at his face with her nails, praying somehow her body would be discovered in one piece and there would be some clue as to who was her killer under her fingernails.

Conán stared hard into her eyes as her struggling became weaker. It felt as though there was some unbearable pressure building up in him, and it was getting stronger and stronger and he didn’t know what was causing it. Naoise fell unconscious after a few more seconds, and Conán became aware of his hands trembling violently.

The pressure inside him built up to an uncontrollable level and, as though burnt, his hands jerked away from Naoise’s throat. Her head fell to the left limply, but she was still breathing, Conán could feel so from where he was pinning her down. He looked at his hands in horror, as though finally realising the extent of what he had been doing over the last three years, nearly four years. His hands were trembling as he held them in front of his face, and suddenly all of the urges left him and he was left with nothing inside him, just a hollow shell that he knew could never be filled again.

He stumbled to the sofa, where he sat in horror and shock until Naoise began stirring on the floor behind him. There was a long silence after she started stirring, and the next thing Conán knew, she had suddenly ran past him and out of the door. He made no move to get her. His only movement was his eyes, following her as she made her escape. He sat in silence until exactly half an hour later, when the door, which had banged closed properly when Naoise had fled, was suddenly knocked upon and began to open. He could hear Naoise’s voice, and he knew the game was up. He walked to the door and calmly opened it, and was faced with two police officers, one of which was Patrick. Conán raised his hands in the air as one of them noticed the blood everywhere, and before he knew it, he had been thrown to the floor, his hands had been jerked roughly behind his back and handcuffed tightly, and he listened as he was placed under arrest on suspicion of murder.

"You do not have to say anything that may harm your defence in court," Patrick said to him, through the haze in Conán’s brain. "Anything you do say will be used against you in a court of law. Is that understood?"

"There’s one thing I don’t get," Conán muttered.

"And what’s that?"

"Where the Hell have you guys been?"

Conán closed his eyes against the stunned silence, and then he broke the silence he had created. He was laughing.