Mostly Murder (8 page)

After Malice killed his girlfriend, he had to keep a low profile. But he found that he was quite an actor, too. He wept at the funeral, even sitting alongside Betsy's grieving, sobbing family. Her mother kept patting his knee and telling him to be brave. It was really pretty fun. He had even gotten all teary-eyed when he thought about how pretty Betsy had looked on Valentine's Day when he'd given her a little gold necklace with a heart on it that he'd stolen from JC Penney. She wore it around her neck in the casket, and he thought that was a sweet gesture of her mother but a real loss of good jewelry.

For months he didn't scare a single soul. He was watching his p's and q's, all right. Even his mother noticed his quiet demeanor and worried about him mourning so long and hard for his poor murdered little girlfriend who had died so young. So, he bided his time, and surreptitiously gathered all sorts of weapons to use when he became an assassin. He broke into houses on weekends and stole handguns and shotguns and filched hatchets and knives from his mom and aunts and killed dogs and cats for practice. It was all pretty easy. When he read in the newspaper about a garrote used in a particularly gruesome Mob-related murder, he fashioned one for himself out of wire and wood dowels. His problem was that he had no privacy and had to hide his stuff out in the woods behind his house. His little sister was sneaky now, a real brat, and was watching his every move so he had to be careful. She wasn't going to tell on him, though, because he'd told her that he'd kill her if she ever told on him. She believed him, and kept her mouth shut. He would, too. Just let her try to get him in trouble, and Mandy would just mysteriously disappear, never to be found again, just like their neighbor's black Lab.

Once he got some books that told about World War II death camps and prison camps and all the cruel stuff that had been done to the prisoners locked up inside them, and he spent long hours upstairs in his room poring over them. He still practiced football and was a star quarterback, and all that, but the terrible things that had been done to people in those books fed his hunger for inflicting pain and fear. He read other books, too. Some were set in the olden days of England when they used to draw and quarter people and had put their severed heads on spikes and impaled them with sharp sticks.

He read about the Spanish Inquisition, too, and what had been done to the people who they had thought to be witches. They had all kinds of torture devices back then, but the worst one had been called the Iron Maiden. It had been a hinged iron box with razor-sharp spikes inside. They had put the accused witches inside and slammed it shut so that all the spikes stabbed into their bodies. He'd never read anything so cool. And he particularly loved one book that he'd found in an old bookstore downtown. It told the true story of some crazy lunatic guy that had put his victims in a maze of dark rooms and hallways and then jumped out and hacked them to pieces with a machete. That book had given him cold chills the first time he read it, but he still loved how the victims screamed and ran and were chased around and finally shot in the back of their heads.

That was when he decided he needed to build a Maze of Terror of his own, a place of horrors where no one could ever, ever escape, where he could chase people all day long and watch them through hidden peepholes and trapdoors. It was exciting to think about that and plan for the future. And he knew exactly where he would build it. Way out in the deepest, darkest part of the swamp where nobody ever went, on an island, where only alligators and snakes and nutria rats lived. Yeah, that would be a perfect place. So he began to search the bayous and find secret routes in and out of the swamp from every direction, just in case he ever got caught playing his games and had to run for his life.

It was fun when he stole off by himself. He wondered sometimes if his friends on the team would like to help him, if they, too, had the urge to hurt people and scare the shit out of them. But he was too careful to involve others. He acted the carefree senior in high school, winning games with his friends, dating popular and pretty girls, making his grades, learning to weld and to build houses at his uncle's construction company, and all the while he was building his own house of horrors, way out in the swamp with the materials he stole from what was left over at his uncle's building sites. He designed it himself, and it was as complicated and evil as hell, but that's what he liked about it.

After he won the football scholarship, he perpetuated his dream, all the while building and planning and scaring people. He began to spend his weekends in the swamp, honing all the scary things, just so. It was during this time that he discovered voodoo and all its creepy rituals. He found the altar by accident, just happened to see the flash of a crucifix, where it was hanging in a tree and swinging in the wind. It was daytime and deserted, and he had never seen a single person within miles of this part of the swamp. It was too dark, too dangerous, and too alligator infested. But he'd heard the beat of drums a couple of times, late at night, and that had spooked him a little.

He nosed his boat onto dry land and waded out toward where he'd seen the glint of silver. There he found the crucifix and lots of other stuff. The altar was fresh. There were all kinds of candles and jars of strange-looking things. Some looked a lot like human body parts. Intrigued, excited, and a little frightened, he held them up to the sunlight filtering down through the cypress trees. One was a human ear in a jelly jar, cut off with ragged edges that fanned out in the formaldehyde when he shook it. Creepy as hell. There was a big bowl of blood, some not yet congealed, and human skulls were sitting all over the place. Many had candles set inside of them, and there were framed pictures of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ and angels surrounded by clouds and trumpets.

There were little bottles hanging off the trees with unknown liquids in them, but he knew it was probably bodily fluids. Fascinated, he wandered there among the symbols of death and destruction. He stole some of the skulls and other stuff and later read everything he could find about voodoo rituals. He learned about voodoo queens who tortured and killed and caused people to turn into zombies. He saw gruesome photos of a body that had been dug up and had body parts removed. He found stories of people who had been cursed and died horrible deaths and disappeared into the swamps never to be found again. Wow, he didn't think he'd ever been so excited. This was it. This was his destiny. He would become a voodoo doctor, and he would use spells and terrifying rituals to scare his victims. And he would do it out in the swamp, where it was dark and sluggish with hanging veils of gray moss and alligators sliding into the water and gliding around. The alligators would be his garbage disposal units, after he'd gotten all the fun he needed out of his victims. It was perfect. It would be his perfect little Garden of Evil.