Journalstone's 2010 Warped Words for Twisted Minds (11 page)

So how did I remedy the blood problem? It was quite simple actually, when I sat down and thought about it. I never had visitors other than my prey, so I simply took out the kitchen table and installed the kind of table they use in morgues! The one I got had a place to hook a hose to it so you could send the fluids directly to a drain. I simply hook a long plastic tube to it when I’m using the table for my catches and run it into my basement. The blood flows right into the drain my washer uses! It’s simple, yet effective.

After I got her all tied up, I removed all of her clothing with scissors and prepared my marinade. This is something for which I remembered to plan.

I got my big metal tub out and poured all of the ingredients into it. I stirred it up well, making sure everything was incorporated, and began to slowly ladle it over her entire body. I used my hands to make sure it got into all of her crevices and rolls. Being that she was a larger woman, I made sure to make extra so I had a little left over. It’s very useful to baste the meat with while it’s cooking.

After I got her covered all over, I sat down and waited for the marinade to work its magic. It would take at least a few hours. I made sure all the doors were locked and laid down on the couch for a short nap – a well-deserved one, if I may say so myself.

I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of screaming. My dinner was awake. It had been a few hours since I fell asleep, and I was sure she would be nice and flavored. I walked into the kitchen and reached into my pantry. As I was grabbing my apron, I heard Cristy cry,

“What the hell is going on here! Let me go!”

I saw her looking down at her naked body as she asked what was covering her. I didn’t reply. My mother taught me not to play with my food, and talking to it is surely not a healthy habit.

I put my apron on and pulled my slow cooker out of the cabinet below my sink. I, then, went back and grabbed two skillets from the same area. Cristy began to scream for help, but lucky for me my nearest neighbor lived a couple miles away. No one would hear her screams. No one would hear anything at all.

I plugged in the slow cooker and grabbed a few ingredients out of the refrigerator. Carrots, potatoes, celery, and onions. I grabbed a knife and my cutting board and began to chop up the veggies. Cristy began to struggle, trying to loosen the ties on her hands. Poor, stupid woman, I’m very good at tying knots and knew she wasn’t going anywhere.

The more she screamed, the wetter my mouth became. Nothing in the world tastes better than freshly chopped meat. The crap you get at the grocery stores has been sitting on the shelves for God knows how long, but my meat was always carved from living flesh. I know where it came from, and I know how appealing it can be.

I plopped my chopped vegetables into the slow cooker and filled it with just a touch of water. I, then, went to my fridge and grabbed a tub of left over fat from my last victim. I scooped a couple of tablespoons of it into the frying pan and added some flour. A nice rue would create thick, delicious gravy. All I needed now was some blood to flavor it with. Raw blood has a metallic taste to it, but if you cook it a little, it’s quite appetizing.

I pulled open the drawer on my sink and grabbed my sharpest knife. I only used this knife for my “special” meals, and I sharpened it after every use. It could cut straight through frozen food and was perfect for filleting a full, fatty body of meat.

I went over to Cristy and as soon as she saw it in my hand, she let out a terrible scream. I hadn’t even cut her yet, and already I was having fun! She kept wiggling, fighting the inevitable.

I slid the knife down her side until I reached the point right in the middle of her shoulder and her hip. I cut into her deeply and held my measuring cup underneath the gash. Oh, how she yelled! I only needed half a cup of the crimson liquid, and it had to be fresh.

I learned the hard way that storing blood in the fridge is a huge mistake. It coagulates and somewhat curdles when it leaves the body. It’s not rotten, but tastes like it should be. Fresh blood always tasted the best.

As I stirred in the red flavoring to my rue, all I could hear was Cristy in the background, yelling out things like, “Why are you doing this?” or “Let me go, you crazy witch!”

Of course, I didn’t answer, I just continued to prepare for my meal.

The rue was good and thick now, and all the metallic taste had been cooked out. I poured in into the slow cooker with all my vegetables and added some salt and pepper. All I needed to do now was add the meat.

I wanted to make a roast with her cheeks, but with all the squirming she did when she first saw the knife, I knew I was going to have to secure her head somehow. I wanted to get a nice, clean cut of flesh from her face, and it would be impossible if it wasn’t immobilized.

I walked back into the garage and grabbed the duct tape. When I came back in, I couldn’t help but giggle. Cristy was trying to untie her hands while I was gone, but all she did was make the knot tighter around her wrists. I found it cute that she actually thought she was going to get out of this. So naïve.

I strolled up to the table and stood right beside Cristy. All her crying had made her mascara run down the side of her face, some of it on those delicious cheeks of hers. I’d have to make sure to wash them well before they went into the stew.

She frantically glanced down and saw the duct tape in my hand and began to sob a bit louder than before. I began to rub her cheeks, saying a light “Shhh” to her as I stroked them.

She could only whisper, “Why are you doing this to me?”

I began to wrap the tape around her head and the table; she began to scream again. I had thought of putting some of the tape on her mouth, but I figured it would just get in my way. Now don’t get me wrong, I loved the sounds of screams, but it made it very hard to concentrate on getting a perfect cut. Tape might get in the way, but if I put something in her mouth, not only would it stop the screaming, but also the opened position would push her cheeks out, making slicing them off a bit easier.

After I had her head secured with the tape, I went to the fridge and looked for something to shut her up. An apple sounded too cliché, plus she could bite right through it, but an orange would suffice. I grabbed one that I thought would fit in her gaping hole and sauntered back. She started to ask me another redundant question, and I stuffed the orange in as far and as tightly as I could. Now all of her screams and stupid questions were nothing more than muzzled whines, like a dog would make in the summer heat.

I grabbed my sharpest knife and began to study Cristy’s face. I wanted to make sure I had a good angle on her cheek muscle. Cristy’s eyes looked as if they were going to pop out of her head. She began to sob even louder through her makeshift gag, and tears began to stream from her eyes.

She tried to wiggle her head, but I taped it good and tight. She wasn’t going anywhere, and I was finally about to have my dinner. I placed the knife on the crease of her cheek near the eye and nose. She let out a sound like the squeal of a baby pig. All I could think was how ironic?

I began to slice into her, rocking the blade of my knife back and forth ever so gently. The makeshift gag did very little to muffle the sounds of agony, but kept the cheek in the prime position for my incision.

My knife sliced through it ever so quickly and smoothly. I placed the cheek on a plate and went back for the other one. It came off her face just as easily. Her muffled screams of pain remained constant.

I took the two cheeks and filleted off the skin from both of them. I, then, rinsed the meat and placed it into my slow cooker. As I was nestling them in the vegetables, I realized I had more room than meat, so I looked back to Cristy to see what else I could use for my masterpiece meal.

Her eyes were now half closed and blood was pouring from her face. As I gave her a look over, I paused at her thighs. Compared to the rest of her body, they looked lean and tender. A couple of nice slices would go great in the stew.

As I was just starting to cut into her right leg, she began to shake violently. She was going into shock and all the movement was ruining my cuts. As much fun as I was having with her alive, I had to stop the convulsions.

I ran to the sink and pulled out the biggest knife I had. I returned to Cristy and plunged it as deep as I could into her chest. The shaking finally stopped, and her eyes began to bulge in disbelief. Yet she looked at me with a stare of relief, as if she were thanking me for putting her out of her misery.

I had never really had anyone look at me like that before. I didn’t quite know how to take it. It made my stomach tingle with both joy and regret, joy for killing her, and regret for killing her before I wanted to. Either way, she was dead now, and I had a dinner to fix.

I finished cutting, filleting, and skinning the meat and placed it in the slow cooker. I turned it to medium heat and sat down by Cristy to wait for the cooker to do its deed.

I was tired, hungry, and still confused by the look she had given me. I didn’t like it at all. I got up to inspect her body again, and her eyes were still open, continuing with that look of relief. It felt like she was glad I killed her. Usually, I would concentrate on the sounds my catches would make. The screams and cries for help is what excited me about killing. But this time, I just had to see her eyes. It almost took all the fun out of my evening until the aroma of the simmering meat filled my nostrils.

The stew smelled like heaven, but Cristy’s body was starting to let off a rotten stench that was ruining the experience. I untied her from the table and set up the tarp on the floor again. I pushed her off the table and onto the tarp, grabbed the corners once again and dragged her into the downstairs bathroom.

Getting her in the tub was easier than getting her on the table. One good heave, and she plopped right in. I closed and locked the door behind me. After dinner was ready, I would finish cutting off the meat from her bones, freezing it for later, like I did with Jeffery. But for now, I had a kitchen to clean up.

I mopped, scrubbed, and bleached every inch of the room, along with the trail of blood I had left by dragging her into the bathroom. By the time I finished, dinner was just about ready.

I washed for dinner in the upstairs bathroom and put on my red velvet shirt, black dress pants, and a pair of black heels. I didn’t get to have a meal this special very often, so I wanted to make it an event.

I set the table with a plate of fine china, a beautiful crystal wine glass, my finest silverware, and a single lit candle. I turned off the slow cooker and removed the lid. The smell of Cristy’s perfectly cooked cheeks and thigh engulfed my nose and made my knees weak. It smelled so delicious.

I removed the meat and plated it beside the vegetables with a bit of the gravy on top. I sat down, poured myself a tall glass of Cabernet, and relaxed for a well deserved feast fit for a queen. After three months of hunting, weeks of preparation, and hours of cooking, I was finally having my dinner with Cristy.

A History of Disappointment

It is difficult for an ugly child to be anything but a disappointment to a perfect mother. My mother was almost impossibly beautiful, and she excelled in every one of her pursuits. She was a brilliant scientist, although her work was unorthodox. It is more difficult, in any case, for a woman to get her theories taken seriously by the scientific community. She was also a gifted artist – a sculptor who created the most incredibly lifelike waxworks. But where she believed she should have been hailed as a pioneer, she was reviled as a crackpot, much the same as her parents before her had been. She was bitter and resentful, and she took out her frustrations on me, her unlovely dullard of a daughter.

I was always the polar opposite of my mother. Where she was brilliant, I was merely smart enough to obey commands. When she was my age she had already read all the great classics of literature, had an adult understanding of mathematics and the sciences, and was an accomplished artist. I sometimes begged to be allowed to go with a governess or tutor to wile away the afternoon at the cinema rather than spend the day studying. I had a greater than average understanding of the sciences, but it was nothing compared to the brilliance of my mother. My understanding of mathematics was but adequate, and my foolish drawings appealed to nobody but myself. My slow-witted nature was always sorely bewildering to my brilliant mother.

When it came to beauty, Mother was exceedingly radiant. She was fair of face, blessed with striking amber waves of hair, and had great, dark eyes like limpid pools. She made herself all the more enchanting through the skillful use of a make-up kit purchased straight from Hollywood. She truthfully proclaimed that neither man nor woman could resist her charms.

It should then come as no surprise that she was ashamed to have given birth to an ugly creature, such as I am. I possessed the same charm as a Raggedy Ann doll come to life with my unruly orange-red curls, staring black eyes, and blotchy, ruddy-cheeked complexion. Mother and I could not possibly have been more opposite.

I was born Anthos Malah Peacock Quaranta 12 years ago on Feb. 3, 1945. Anthos means “flower” in Greek, and Mala is a Sanskrit word for “necklace.” Thus, my name means “a necklace of flowers.” Mother always told me that I was a hideously ugly baby, and she hoped if she gave me a beautiful name I would eventually blossom. So far I have remained a homely, untalented embarrassment to the brilliant, beautiful, and artistically gifted Doctor Victoria Peacock.

My father, the late Wullem “Wum” Quaranta, died in battle less than a month before my birth. He was the son of Líadán Holguín, a Spanish actress, and Isaac Quaranta, an Italian concert pianist who became a spy for Germany during World War I. My grandfather was shot for treason following a brief trial. My grandmother committed suicide as soon as my father was old enough to fend for himself.

My mother, Victoria Oenone Jacob Peacock, was born to be a scientific genius. Her parents were fourth cousins, the products of a long line of explorers and theorists in the worlds both seen and unseen. Her mother, Oenone Pocok, postulated biological engineering theories that were rejected as both inhumane and insane. Her father, Jacob Peacock, was a brilliant, Oxford-educated chemist whose wild theories regarding the creation of a serum to allow virtual immortality made him the laughingstock of his colleagues.

Mother’s parents committed suicide by self-evisceration on New Year’s Day 1921, literally spilling their guts to the unreceptive scientific community which they blamed for driving them to poverty and despair. The gruesome moment was immortalized on film. The couple hired an unscrupulous filmmaker to document their suicide and deliver the macabre motion picture to grandfather’s colleagues at Oxford as punishment for their derision.

Mother was just 12 years old at the time of her parents’ suicide, and she swore as soon as she was old enough to resume their work, she would prove their detractors wrong. She was raised after their deaths by a distant cousin who conveniently died after expressing her disapproval of Mother’s involvement with my father.

Had the cousin not passed, she could have petitioned to have my mother removed from the will for her defiant behavior. However, with the cousin out of the way, Mother was the sole heir to her parents’ will, which consisted of their home and everything in it. She was also heir to the cousin’s modest fortune, which she invested wisely and within two years began making a sizeable return. At this point she began her experimentation using her parents’ formulas in earnest.

As if Mother’s laboratory were not already a terrible enough place, she hung a portrait of her parents there to make the atmosphere all the more Draconian. I always felt as if I needed to behave so properly in their presence, lest they should see fit to punish me. They were, to put it mildly, quite a severe-looking pair.

Grandfather Peacock was a long-limbed, heavyset gentleman with a ruddy complexion and copious ringlets of dark red hair. Pupils resembling violet jewels glared from his bulging sclera. His countenance seemed that of a madman, and I often had nightmares wherein he came to my room and drained me of my life in the manner of Dracula.

Grandmother Peacock seemed the very antithesis of joy. Her ugly, nervous face reflected a deep-seated evil. She had sleek magenta hair and wicked green eyes, glaring from beneath a perpetual frown. She reminded me of the wicked queen from Snow White, and I hated her instinctively. I was glad I had never known either of these terrible people, and, as I got older, I realized that Mother’s own malevolent personality must be the result of their neglect and maltreatment.

Father and Mother were married for less than a year when he was killed in battle. Theirs was a passionate and volatile relationship. They were polar opposites. Father was emotional, a stereotypical hot-blooded Italian, according to Mother, who herself went several steps beyond the famed British “stiff upper lip” attitude. Mother was not calm, composed and collected. She was cold. She was a very angry woman but her anger did not burn, it caused frostbite. She rarely struck me, and when she did it was never hard enough to leave a mark, but I felt the chill of her disappointment in me every day of my life.

“Would that I had the sense not to think with my loins the night I met that hot-headed Italian,” Mother often lamented. “Then I would not have been cursed with the disappointment of an ungrateful and intellectually inferior child, such as you.”

“I gwateful, Mummy,” I remember a very tiny me pleading. “I sowwy I inferimur.”

It was near the end of my third year when I realized nothing I could do would ever make my mother happy, and I ceased pleading for her affections. I simply obeyed her as best I could, fully aware that I could never make her love me. Most of the time my only hope was to avoid her wrath by obeying her every command without question. I also learned that praising her efforts might earn me a brief moment of affection, though she was incapable of compassion, let alone love, which she considered a weak and useless emotion.

Art and Science

Mother was a perfectionist not only in the scientific field but also in her art, and it paid off. Every detail of the wax figures she created was perfect. I do not mean perfect in the sense that she only created beautiful, flawless people. I mean perfect in the sense that they were exact duplicates of her models.

I always held out hope she would one day teach her technique to me. After all, it wasn’t as if she had a myriad of choices for a progeny to whom she could pass her knowledge. I was her only child, and though it was apparent this fact did not at all please her, there are in this Universe some truths that even she was incapable of altering.

My mother’s first wax sculpture was created to honor my father. I felt an instinctual affection for the man, which was as strong an emotion as the extreme dislike I felt for my thankfully unknown maternal grandparents. Father had a cherubic face, though his was rather a gaunt figure. He had deep blue eyes and copious waves of blue-black hair.

His wax doppelganger’s left arm was held with the elbow bent and the left hand turned inward just below his face. His right hand was extended in such a way that it invited me to grip the fingers lightly when Mother was not around. I wished the war had not taken Father from me before he had ever held me in his arms. I felt that unlike my mother, my father would have loved me in spite of my flaws. Whenever I met my father in dreams he was kind, yet he seemed terribly sad.

There were other waxworks, most of whom I had known throughout my childhood. The women had primarily been maids, tutors, or governesses. Some of the men had been my tutors, but most had been introduced as colleagues of Mother’s. Many of these colleagues had become her lovers. They treated me with varying degrees of affection.

One of them was a chaplain from a nearby town who had been relieved of his position for his heretic opinions. His name was Dean Head, which I always thought an amusing name and could not control my giggling the first time he introduced himself. This earned me a slap from my mother, but Dean spoke in my favor.

“No, Victoria, there’s no need to strike the lass,” he gently admonished. “It is a funny name, so it is. Chaplain Dean Head, founder of a new school of religious thought, based firmly on scientific principles. I am a radical thinker, my dear, so your mum and I are two of a kind. I hope you and I will be great friends.”

The wax sculpture of Dean stood gazing thoughtfully toward the corner of the room, as if he were contemplating the nature of God. Physically, he reminded me of my father. He was a tall, willowy man with unruly black hair and violet eyes. By nature he was uncomplicated and possessed an amazingly strong zest for life. The only time I had ever been happy was in his presence.

I supposed that Mother must have instilled a bit of her own morose nature into each of these works, for Dean’s face was drawn and gaunt, which was very unlike the man I had known. Although he was a thin fellow, he was always in robust good health, jaunty, and joyful. Unlike some of my mother’s other lovers, he liked children. He called me “my kidda,” and I found myself hoping for my own sake that he would be my stepfather. For his sake I wished that he’d take himself as far from Mother as possible, which he finally did, two years after meeting her.

I couldn’t blame Dean for leaving, though I often found myself wishing he would have taken me with him. I think he would have stayed in spite of my mother’s extreme fluctuations in mood if she had only been true to him. But she had many assistants, and by the time I was 10 years old, I was aware she was having affairs with most, if not all of them — mostly the men, but I did once see her kissing one of her female assistants as if they were lovers. I kept this knowledge to myself. I’ve no idea what she would have done to me if she realized I knew.

Most of the assistants were college-aged, but some of the lads looked to be only a few years older than myself. Once Mother was through with them, they never returned. She always made wax sculptures to commemorate them. Mother broke many hearts over the years. If Father had not died in battle, he surely would have divorced her for her philandering.

Mother planned to sell her immortality formula at an extremely high price once she perfected it. I was sure she was correct in assuming people would pay any price for immortality. So far, her formulations brought only disfiguring death fraught with suffering.

She usually brought me in to dissect the corpses of her subjects while she threw herself into research to improve the next batch of formula. I never had a cat, dog, bird, rabbit, rat, or monkey for a pet. Instead, I saw countless numbers of these creatures before me on an operating table. I would expose their internal organs so that Mother could discern the extent and type of damage done by her serum.

Some of her specimens had their organs liquefied. In other cases, young animals aged and died in a matter of minutes. Some suffered internal hemorrhage, and at other times, certain processes essential to life simply failed. One formulation caused the iron base of the blood, hemoglobin, to turn to zinc. The skin of the unfortunate animal given this poison became dead white, as if it had been bled to death. When I drew the scalpel over the skin, the blood that came out was white and chalky. I always felt sad for Mother’s specimens, but I could not allow myself to become emotionally involved if I were to keep my sanity.

“We do this in the name of science, Anthos,” Mother would remind me each time I was called upon to dissect one of her victims.

I would agree, all the while wanting to scream that it was she, not I, who was responsible for administering the deadly formulations to these creatures.

“You do it in the name of your brand of demented pseudo-science,” I wished to tell her. “You administer these formulas to countless victims without regard to how your potions make them suffer. Do not name me as your co-conspirator, for I would never behave in such an unethical fashion.”

I said nothing as I drew my scalpel across the bulging abdomen of her latest victim. It was clear that all the cells in this monkey’s body had lysed, leaking fluid into its tissues and causing its trunk and extremities to bulge.

I often thought of running away but wondered where I would go. Mother kept the house locked up like a fortress. The perimeter of the grounds was surrounded by a 7 meter tall wall equipped with alarms to alert her to the presence of any intruder. These alarms would also have informed her of anyone attempting to scale the boundary from the inside. Besides, climbing the wall without equipment would have been a nearly impossible task.

As I wrote in my journal, I was a prisoner. I detailed a fantasy of one day escaping this death camp and being made a hero for turning my mother over to the police for her insanity and cruelty.

The Discovery