The Road Home - Continued - Draft

The very first time was an accident. A momentary lapse of concentration, a slip of the foot, clammy hands slipping on the wheel. My journey rapidly turned from a relatively quick commute home down a quiet country lane to something most would consider horrendous and that I considered an awakening.

It had been a long day at work and I was exhausted. Slipping out of the office and into my car had brought me nothing but thoughts of home, of Julia and the meal she’d be cooking, a glass of wine and, if the mood took us, upstairs to bed for dessert.

Breaking out of the city was as mind numbing as you’d expect. Stopping and starting, stopping and starting until I finally reached the open road that would bring me to Mill Lane, a road barely wide enough for two cars and lined with trees on either side, but which would bring me home.

The mists has closed in as I hit that home straight but it was rare to meet any other traffic on this road so I pushed the motor maybe just a little harder than I should. I tried a slurp of coffee from my hastily bought service station coffee but missed my face entirely, pouring lukewarm latte down my shirt.

That is when it all went wrong. What had at last glance had appeared to be the silhouette of a tree poking out into the road turned out to be a hitcher with his thumb in the road hoping for a good Samaritan to pick him up.

With my attention more focused on a cardboard cup and a sodden shirt, it was too late by the time or saw him. I stabbed wildly at the breaks but only managed to clip it while my wet hands tried feverishly to get purchase on the wheel. I only managed to send the car into a massive slide, smashing the rear end into the poor fellow who happened to be sharing the road with me.

Time shifted and I was at a standstill, the mists pooling round my car. Shock and adrenalin were distorting my perception making it seem that I was trapped in a little white bubble round my car, illuminated only by my lights.

I managed to calm my ragged breaths, to focus my shattered mind and opened the car door to see what I had done and what I could do for the poor fellow I had hit.
What I found will stay with me forever. To see a human form so battered and torn, rent beyond recognition was at once sickening but also strangely fascinating. He – for I presumed it was a he – lay in the ditch at the side of the road. Between my car and the trees he was in bad shape. His limbs were twisted and broken, his face had scrapped the road leaving one side a hunk of mangled flesh and bone and the other bloodied and misshapen, his nose hanging loose to one side.

A voice said I should act but the overriding impulse was to watch, watch the fragility of life cling to its existence, afraid and alone save for me, a seeming casual observer.

Between short and bubbling breaths, a voice so tinged with pain and weakness that it almost never came forth said “help me”.

Two words, so simple and human but they had a profound effect on me. Most people would have dashed to his side. Phoned an ambulance or administered what first aid they could. Ran for help, even. Not me. Not today. Time seemed to stop while something inside me mulled the pros and cons of my next decision.

What came next was not me. It was as though I was sat at home, comfy and warm, watching a bad detective show on the TV. However, there was no sleuth hell bent on catching the despicable killer, there was just me, a dark road and a near human hunk of flesh in a ditch.

I drew my mobile from my pocket as words, incomprehensible at first listening, spilled from my mouth. Cold words, words I’d never once dreamed I’d utter.
“I’m sorry my friend, my phone has no signal and I don’t know where I am.” came my easy lies “I’d offer you first aid but I don’t think it would help. You’re in a bad way down there.” I said, scanning the road left and then right, lightly treading my way toward him. “It doesn’t look like a busy road but you can only hope that someone comes, someone who can save you. A paramedic maybe”

A cool, cold rushed up my spine filling me with an effervescent thrill. What was this that was happening to me? His pleas now turned to quiet moans and sobs as I crouched down next to him, closing the gap, smelling the scent of blood and flesh, relishing my proximity to one so near death.

“I could see what I can do.” Hope blossomed in what could be seen of his remaining eye. Did he really consider me his saviour? “But, and I hate to tell you this, what I can do is nothing. You see, right here and right now, I’d really like to watch you die.”

That is when his hope died and true panic was born. He twitched and thrashed and moaned and did his very best to call me all the names a dying man would call a twisted man like me but, it was to no avail.

In the ten minutes that passed, I watched a myriad of emotions come and then go in that one eye, that one portal into mind of the man in front of me. I watched at his weak breaths became more laboured, as the blood pooled on the floor around me, watched as the last traces of life slipped from his body leaving only meat behind.

The experience of watching that man die, however remotely connected to my hand, was both electric and calming. It is an inexplicable thing unless you hold that power in your hand.

What I do know is this. On that night, at the edge of a quiet misty lane, a monster was born.



Two weeks passed, each filled with a sense of dread as I waited for the knock on my door and the police to appear, to take my arms and bind them in steel, robbing me of my freedom and offering me a cold grey cell has my home for years to come.

It would be human to feel guilt for what had come to pass on that quiet lane but I didn’t feel even a tiny inkling of remorse, not a glimmer of guilt. Instead I felt fear. Fear that I had shattered the fragile illusion that was my life. Fear that I would bring shame to all that knew me and loved me.

In my few quiet moments, when I wasn’t brooding about the coming storm, I had flashes of those eyes that had etched themselves into my memory. Those beautiful eyes, so full of longing to live and fear of death and hatred, hatred of me, the man who would only crouch and watch as the pain, and then finally death, engulfed him.

Oh, how I loved those eyes. They were coming to take over my life, filling my mind when it was unoccupied, calling on me to see them. If I were an artist, my walls would be filled with paintings and sketches and sculptures of those dread filled eyes so I could look at them whenever the calling came.

One quiet weekend morning, as my wife poached eggs for my breakfast, the paper dropped onto the doormat, carrying simple news of my liberation.

It seems that someone, somewhere, was watching and smiling over me. No uniformed figures were going to appear at my door to drag me away, no calls would come with questions I could not answer. Normality – or what little normality was left in me - drifted back into place.

The paper had carried only the smallest of articles but there it was in black and white. First – as I had started calling him - had been named as Michael Dewson. He was a drifter with known mental health and drug related problems. He had previously gone missing this year and nearly died of an overdose were it not for the heroic intervention of a passer-by.

His sister, who was beginning to worry for his safety, had put a plea out to the public or, at the very least, those who read the local paper. She remained hopeful of his safe return but I knew better, I knew now that no serious search would take place and that no body, safely resting in a hastily dug grave in heavy woodland, would ever be found.

Lost in the excitement I realised my heavy breathing and slight grin had caught the attention of my wife, who had ceased poaching eggs and was looking at me as a doctor might look upon a madman.

It seemed that I needed to work on my cool, calm exterior, my self control. It wouldn’t do turn into a drooling madman every time I read news of a victory. I made my excuses – something about a particularly good result on a bet I’d made – and no more was said on the matter.

We chatted as any married couple would chat over breakfast. We talked of plans for the day, what we might have for dinner and whether we should go to the Smiths at the weekend or whether they should come here. It all came easily to me, so natural, yet; the back of my head was buzzing, spinning and wheeling away. It was weighing all the pros and cons of my next decision, all along knowing what the answer would be to the only question that truly mattered. Would I kill again and when but, most importantly, who?

My wife finished up the dishes and kissed me goodbye as she went off to work for the afternoon. My Saturday was spent, cup of tea in hand, in the conservatory, mulling over the questions of the day.

These weren’t questions I would answer lightly. I knew I couldn’t just drive the lanes at night hoping that I’d accidentally kill a drifter that no one would search too hard for. I also knew that I had opened this door and set myself on this road. I couldn’t just forget about what had happened. I couldn’t ignore the need to see those eyes, so full of fading life, again. I needed to see them so badly that my heart was racing with just the thought of it.

What I had to do was be clever and focused and clean. If I could keep myself together and approach this logically I could keep myself free of the hands of the law and look into the eyes of death countless times until my own end came and someone watched as the life slipped from my own eyes.
So there it was, I’d go from loving family man, kids away at university, wife working part time to fund our holidays, to a serial killer bent on ending as many as I could.
First was First, who would be Second?

As it turned out, Second was a mistake. She was the wrong choice and I wished she could be undone but move forward and get the ball rolling carried me to her like a leaf on the wind.

I had been at work minding my own business and occupying myself as only one can when you’re alone and bored in your office. Aimlessly surfing the net.

I closed the blinds and set to work. My digital wanderings found me reading an article about the right to die. The gist was that if you were ill beyond the remedy of medicine or prayer then you should have the right to take your own life in as painless and dignified way as possible. A reasonable enough request if you asked me but those who deemed themselves in charge of such things said no, if you want to die you’ll have to do it as nature intended. Long, drawn out and in pain.

This seemed a truly ridiculous set up to me but I wasn’t going to concern myself with the bureaucracy of death. What really grabbed my attention was a selection of interviews with sufferers of terminal disease and their opinions on it. In a true bout of unbiased journalism, all the sides of the argument covered. There were those who, with calm grace, said that death was only God’s to grant and that they continue on until he granted them peace.

There were those who just wanted to cling to life for as long as possible, fearful of what came next and unsure if the immortal soul existed to carry them to the next world or if eternal nothingness was their fate. Then there was Edna Green, 76 and housed in a hospice no more than 60 miles from my office. She was suffering from liver cancer that had spread before diagnosis and was now lay waiting for the end in a home full of suffering and death. She had been told that she had two weeks to six months to live and to expect it to get worse whilst she waited.

She was a tough old lady, still endowed with the wartime spirit from all those years ago and she knew her own mind. She’d stared death in the eye many times as the bombs fell and she was at peace with it. She knew she was going to die and had no qualms expediting its approach if it meant she could avoid bringing pain and suffering to herself and all those who would have to watch her dwindle away day by day.

This woman wanted to die but legislation and ever watchful nurses prevented her from achieving her goal. Maybe this was where I could come in. Maybe I could be an angel of death. I must confess the thought elated me. I could see the eyes again at the same time as offering peace to a suffering soul. It was quid pro quo, guilt free pleasure for me and a welcome end for them.

It was almost a public service. I should be given a medal. Ok, maybe that was a stretch of an excited imagination but this was a course of action I was more than willing to take.

Feigning toothache and dashing off to a last minute dentist appointment, I instead made my way to the local library. A huge grey stone building, it offered a vast, anonymous repository of knowledge on a variety of subjects. In this case, I was looking for an easy to source, nearly instant, painless poison. I’d prefer it to offer few outward symptoms too. I’d like to make Mrs Edna Green my Second and to send her to the next world swiftly and painlessly with minimal risk to myself. Not too much to ask for, I hoped.

My first thoughts turned to the world of flora. Plants, weeds and the like should be relatively easy to source and work with as well has offering me the results I was after. I spent hours wandering amongst aisles upon aisles of shelves, plucking books and articles that I thought would offer me the magic herb I would need to get my fix.

I sat and read and drank bitter coffee for an age, people quietly going about their library business, but my research offered me no way forward. Everything I found that offered a slice of hope only fulfilled aspects of my perfect death model. I could do quick or painless or symptomless but never all three combined. It was time to turn my mind elsewhere.

Drugs maybe? Nothing illegal, bought from a dark character in a darker ally, but pharmaceutical grade stuff. Though the thought of breaking in anywhere to steal what I needed gave me pause. Too many complications, reports of the crime and Police investigations seemed to lower my odds of success and prolonged freedom.
No, this would not do.

What else was there? Violence? Out of the question. Persuading her to kill herself while I watched on? Didn’t really offer me what I want out of this. I want to be the vehicle that induces death, to see my hand at work whilst they slip away.

Books and articles on euthanasia offered me hope for a moment but after gathering them I spent an hour reading about the moral and ethical dilemmas of ending another’s life. I found clinics in Switzerland that specialised in aiding the end of life but, unless I applied for a job, there was no salvation there.

The last article I picked up detailed some of the varied ways that people had used to take their lives; overdoses, slashed arteries, overdoses, gassing themselves with a car, hanging, gunshot to the head and decapitation – though I’m not sure who would choose to kill themselves with decapitation! The list went on. It seemed that the human race had created countless ways to cease to be but none that helped me.

If only I was a less friendly and cautious killer. I could have popped her off and be home for dinner by now. I wanted to do her a service though and anything less than my full attention and planning would do her a disservice and bring me swiftly to justice.

Frustrated, I tossed the article to the table and leaned back with a sigh. A few glances from upset library goers, their little silent bubble briefly burst, were calmed by an apologetic wave and smile.

I closed my eyes and experimented with a few deep breaths to calm and centre me. What was the thought that bugged me, that niggled away, asking to be heard? Running slowly through all the information in my head, I tossed each piece around, trying to shake loose the vestige of an idea.

It smacked me like a freight train. Gas! Hadn’t I read something somewhere recently that scuba divers had to keep on top of their equipment or fatal amounts of some gas or another could get in the tank? I’d certainly heard enough in the news recently to know that carbon monoxide was known as the silent killer. Combine these two pieces of information and the shadow of a shape of a plan was beginning to form in my mind.

I hastily returned the items on the table to their places amongst the shelves and let my excitement take hold, frantically scampering about the library, plucking volumes from here and tomes from there.

An hour or so of research later and I discovered if you removed selected filters from the compressor used to fill a scuba tank and left its air intake to close to a source of carbon monoxide, such as a car exhaust, then you would more than likely end up with a tank full of deadly gas. As I packed away my things, I theorised that if I struck at the right moment then there would be little or no reason for anyone to suspect foul play and I would at last have my Second.



Eight days passed and I found myself £2,500 lighter and in the possession of two emergency scuba tanks - each holding 3 cubic meters of air or enough for around 60 breaths –, an air compressor, an airtight face mask and a carbon monoxide testing kit. I’d toyed with the idea of buying only one scuba tank but the thought that I’d run out of gas half way through the job terrified me so I bought two, content that I’d get both into a backpack without complication.

The next phase of my plan would have to be in two parts as I knew time was pressing. Part one was to experiment with my compressor and tanks to get a suitably high concentration to quickly dispatch Second. Part two was infiltration. I needed to get to know the hospice, to know its staff and layout to become a recognised face with all around so I could become all but invisible when in its corridors.

This appeared less complicated than I first thought. A quick phone call to the hospice manager - during which I explained I’d read an article in the paper and just wanted to help out, to be a friendly face during peoples twilight - and I was booked for a visit to see about volunteering.

I thought it was all too easy but it seemed people were more than willing to accept my newfound altruism without once suspecting the sinister intent underneath my ready smile.

My life now existed of work, performing my husbandly duties to not to arouse suspicion with my wife – who thoroughly approved of my voluntary work – tinkering with my new equipment in the garage and being the new guy around the halls of a hospice.

I found, with little effort on my part, that my face just fit. With the right words in the right places at the right time, people would pretty much believe anything you said. I made it my job to get on well with the staff bit more so with the patients. I actually began to enjoy my time there, spending time with the dying folk, chatting about times gone by, reading to them, running errands and generally bringing a smile to their faces when smiles were in short supply.

I even got to know my blessed Second. Sat and listened to her tales of Joe, the husband lost to her four years back. About his heroics in the war and how he returned to her, draped in medals, to marry her and give her her two children, Stella and William. I met them once or twice as they visited and our paths crossed. Lovely people, devastated by their mother’s illness and barely containing the grief of what the coming weeks would bring.

I would help ease them into their grieving just as soon as I could, as soon as the time, which was fast approaching, was right.

So I continued my experiments at home, convincing my wife that I had a newfound hobby in tinkering with our car – she always did say I needed a hobby – and tinker I did. I had better results if I removed the catalytic convertor on the exhaust and ran a pipe from straight to the intake on the compressor. The level in the tanks was high but I wanted to be sure of a relatively swift death so I mocked up a cover for the intake and sealed it on with duct tape. I cut a hole in this cover which was big enough to fit my exhaust extension through. This too was sealed on with duct tape and I had an air tight passage from car to compressor. One last tweak of the filters and settings on the compressor and I found I had two tanks of suitably lethal gas hidden in my garage, poised, ready to kill.

The time was creeping closer, every instinct was urging to strike but I knew caution was the better option. Second was ill but she would hang on for a few days yet. I put a plan into action and got closer to Mrs. Whitmore. She had been admitted with a brain tumour that saw her with only days, a week if she was lucky, left in this world. She slept a lot of the time but I made it my mission to bring joy to her waking moments and to make sure everyone around knew it too. She was a spinster with no family left in the world to come and visit. I was all she had in these final moments of her life so I set up camp beside her bed with a pack of cards so we could play Gin in her better moments and a funny story for when her hands couldn’t grip the cards.

The days passed and the end approached for Second. In the few times I got up to visit her, she was frail and grey, weakened from illness and medication she struggled to do much more than lay in bed and gaze unseeing at the TV.
The next day, the tanks came with me to the hospice. I told the nurses I feared the worst for Mrs. Whitmore so I’d stay by her side for a little of the night, maybe bed down in dorm room they had here if I stayed too late.

The day quietened and the night drew in. Corridors fell empty, apart from the occasional rounds of the nurses, and the last visitors going home. I lingered, Mrs. Whitmore’s hand in mine, my lethal cargo pushed under her bed, out of sight.
We chatted for a while and played a few hands of Gin until she tired and fell asleep. I stayed there, holding her hand, whispering sweetness into her dreams, stayed until the nurses made their rounds, smiling at the sweet man who stayed so late to comfort a dying woman.

As they left me there, alone with my sleeping alibi, my mood shifted to one of nerves, apprehension and excitement. The time was now, Second was so close I could feel her eyes on mine, could see the fires of life, low as they were in here, ebbing away to ashes.

I had to move quickly to ensure success.

Silent corridors became home to my swift movements. No sign of other souls was to be found aside from the distant noises of people settling down to a long shift in the night. The stairs failed to offer even a slight sinister creak as I ascended to the room of Second, the proximity of the deed almost too much, pumping excitement and joy around my veins.

And there I was, outside the door that held my sweet release. I loathed to call Second prey as I had not hunted her but she offered herself, unknowing, to me and my hands. I paused at the threshold to victory, breathed and listened for the signs that I may be interrupted mid kill. Thankfully, there were none. In I went.

Second lay quiet, motionless, the only sign of life was the ever so slight movement of breath in her frail lungs as she slept. She seemed to be more ghost than woman, lay there on the bed that had been her home in her final moments of life. I stood and watched and appreciated once more how each and every life was a gift, given by chance but gone within the blink of an eye. It was that blinking eye that I had come to see again so I shook away any philosophical thoughts and set to work.

A moment spent gently shaking her shoulder and quietly whispering her name brought Second out of whatever dream she had been lost and back to the cold reality of this world. The shock of her sudden awakening passed and she smiled up at the face she had begun to know. I silenced the questions that I could see forming on her lips by holding a single finger to mine.
It is a gesture that is learned as a child and which stays with us through life. It is one tells of silence of a secret to be told. So I told her mine.

“Hello Edna” I whispered, comforting and warm “I have come to tell you something, a secret I have carried from before I even met you. I have come to kill you. Not because I cannot stand to see your suffering and pain, not because I see myself as an angel sent to carry you away but because I really, really like it”

There was the panic that I so loved, flashing to life in the black, so beautifully ringed with grey green irises. Oh, I did not know how much I had missed that look of fear, of knowing the end.

I should have moved by now, to have hurried the end and made it back to my alibi but I could not. Weakened as she was by malaise and medication, she could not struggle or shout to raise alarm, just lay there and lock her eyes on my own and feed the hunger in my heart.

My head, thankfully, knew better and urged me to get my apparatus out, though I must confess the excitement led me to fumble the zip as I tried to get in to the bag.

Once it was clear and set, ready to release its noxious cargo, I paused to take in one last lingering look at the scene. It was one look to many. Her breathing had slowed and the panic subsided. The only thing I saw now in those eyes was acceptance and thanks. The revulsion I felt at seeing that, there, in those eyes once full of fear, stunned me and left me dumbfounded. This was not why I came, was not why I was here. So much planning had gone into this one moment and it was now ruined. I would not find my fix here but, I was here and had gone too far to turn back now. I must see it through and claim my second, as much as I did not want her on my murderous CV anymore.

I ought to grab the lamp from the bedside and smash her smiling face in with wild, frenzied blows. That’d bring the fear back. That would give me what I need. That, said a voice at the back of my head from behind my anger, will get you arrested. The noise alone would attract attention in moments. The violence of it all would raise questions and investigations and leave behind an evidence trail so large a fool could follow it. I must follow the plan.

Begrudgingly, I slipped the mask on her face and let loose the flow of gas. “Breath deep” I told her “do not panic or struggle. You will be asleep in a few breaths and the end will come without you knowing”

She nodded and smiled as she took her first lungful. She had the audacity to clutch my hand with hers and give me a squeeze of gratitude as the gas took her and she slipped from consciousness.

I stayed with her until her pulse faded away and I knew she was gone from this world.

Numb, I staggered away from her bed and room, back down the stairs and to my quiet alibi. My mind was reeling as I sat there holding the hand of a stranger. All part of an act I’d been playing out here so I could recreate that the feelings of that night long ago. All the work and time and research I’d put into this night was all for nothing. All I had achieved was to ease the suffering of an old woman whilst increasing my own.

I had learnt, though, what it was I was seeking when I killed. To see cold fear and hatred in my victims as they died.

So here I was, saddened by my experience tonight but surer of what I wanted in the future.

Second was a mistake. Third would be art.