The true story of a man who seeks revenge for his wife's murder at the hands of a fledgling serial killer
ALEX stood looking out of the second story window at the world below; the city streets are a carnival, it is burlesque. His senses are accelerated and he can hear the pain and the sin on every street corner. The city moves like an insect. It scurries. Neon beats against the window like a probe, even in the day.
And somewhere, buried deep within this crazy world, is the man who killed his beloved Elnora.
Ellie, his one true love, his lifeline to the real world, now nothing more than a ghost, a painful memory.
Staring down at the circus below him, Alex thinks, man, this city is dark; it’s cold and dangerous and dying, all gray-rotting death around us as a constant reminder that it is all inescapable. There is a nervous sanctuary behind closed doors, and we all lie on our beds at night and listen to the sounds.
A bright flash of red neon illuminates the window, blinding Alex momentarily. He places his hand over his face. It is a handsome face, but lined with age from too much pain and heartache from the past. Alex fixes his gaze on the empty bed close by, as he takes a sip from a liquor bottle and listens to another news broadcast on the small radio by his bed.
Just in at WVUT news; the body of local resident Elnora Warren was found three days ago, in the woods behind Hillcrest Park. The condition of the remains has lead local authorities to believe Warren is the fifth victim of the serial killer known as ‘the Red Reaper,’ a man who prowls the local singles bars in search of his victims…
Alex walked over and turned the radio off and took another sip from the bottle. He glanced over at his PC and decided to work on his new book. The book about his life.
His life with Ellie.
He sat down and took a deep breath and began hitting the keys: A long sip of whiskey with no chaser this time; locked away inside the mindset I used to place myself in when hanging out at some dive bar drowning my sorrows. It is a dark place with no windows, a sad place. A place where some serial killers are born.
Alex stopped typing and listened to the sounds coming from the street below; drug dealers, pimps, and hookers. The walking wounded looking for something that isn’t there and never will be, lost souls looking for love in all the wrong places. He began typing again: I tilt my head back and say her name only once, remember the eager twinkle of her voice and the way it could send shivers through my blood with only a single word. I close my eyes and try to taste the sky. The stars radiate with a ginger tinge, their echoing drone a momentary distraction from the pool of pain in my chest. A single fragment of light pierces the corner of my eye. I walk slowly to the coffee table, afraid of what’s staring at me in its glass center among old magazines and an ashtray. Ellie's necklace dangles from the edge, its shiny silver speckles bursting with robust force. The last time I saw this it was draped around her neck, its opal pendant swooped between freckled cleavage and pastel skin.
Alex walked over and picked it up, held it to his chest, tears welling up in his eyes. He blinked them away and sipped from the bottle again, then sat back down and began typing: Three days since the phone call and I’ve forgotten what the sun looks like, locked away inside my own prison. The phone call letting me know Ellie was dead. My heart stops beating and for a moment this entire life is nothing but a cruel dream. It’s only when I wake up that I realize she’s really gone. It’s only when I open my eyes that I realize that she was taken away from me, prematurely snatched out of my grasp like a feather in a high wind, only to land back in my heart and mind every single night, torturing me. The good memories left me with nothing but ashes for memories and tears of pain; the bad ones with a wordless rage. I had to escape tonight; the loneliness too much to bear.
#
The autumn wind of an Indiana night blows across the cemetery. It plays a malevolent, whistling tune through the trees of the cemetery as Alex Baker stands motionless, surveying the soft, brown earth that holds his beloved Ellie. Tears well up in his eyes as he gazes down upon the inscription on her gravestone: Shine on you crazy diamond.
Alex wipes the tears from his eyes and swallows the lump in his throat as he steps closer, touching the grave stone, stroking it gently with his fingers. “I miss you, little diamond,” he says.
He comes here a lot now, reminiscing over all the good times he had with Ellie, and their private conversations. An aspiring poet, something she wrote for him still haunts his dreams at night: this I will remember when the rest of life is through, the finest thing I have ever done was simply loving you.
The feelings he’d had to endure – anger, abandonment, denial, disbelief, social with-drawl, and then even guilt, made him feel powerless over his own destiny. And crimes like these – unexpected, violent, and forever – are hard enough to bear without the fact that the victim’s killer has yet to be brought to justice.
The victims and victims’ families are serving life sentences, having to live with the horror and heartache for the rest of their lives. He’d always been taught that everything happened for a purpose – and at times even a higher purpose – but at that point in time that was hard for him to swallow.
He had been raised in a devout Christian atmosphere, so losing his faith was something totally new and terrifying to him. All of the hard lessons he’d learned up until then had seemed to have been forgotten and he was lost in that abiding darkness, more and more so with each passing day, until he’d felt totally consumed by it. The abiding darkness of his soul he’d decided to bear patiently, in hopes that it would eventually lead back into the light, but it was a long hard road back home.
And lately, his thoughts had been veered toward revenge.
#
I’m not afraid to let things break
Or reach into the shattered pieces
To find out if I want to make
The leap into begins and ceases
Laboring heavily against the urge to just quit breathing, reading over the lines he had just written, Alex felt a burgeoning darkness inside of him.
Outside, the snow was falling quick and silent. He had been out not an hour ago, had stood listening to the night, and heard the cars sloshing down Bruceville Road half a block away. All was silent on his street, no cars passed at this hour, only the soft hiss as the damp snow piled atop the seven inches left from yesterday’s storm. It was Thursday, and a half mile away, somewhere in the stillness of the early morning city, was the man who’d taken his Ellie away from him.
He was still suffering from writer's block, too. After all, how could he write a book about their life together, when their life together no longer existed?
He stopped typing. On the sink counter next to where he sat was the prescription bottle of Morphine he had brought home from the emergency room the week prior when he’d had taken a fall at work and had broken three ribs.
He glanced toward it, stood, shook his hands, and unscrewed the cap to the container, turning two pills out into his palm. Swallowing them dry, he paced into the dining room and snatched up his Carhart work coat and stepped outside, into the still winter night scape, and reflected back on their relationship, doing his level best to figure out where he’d gone wrong. Ellie wouldn’t want me to feel this way, he thought, glumly, but I didn’t make him feel any better.
He had begun to write music again when the nights pressed upon him relentlessly, driving sleep away and leaving him alone to contemplate the abandonment he had faced. It was, at least, movement, if not forward, then of a lateral nature, and there, though he still felt her presence through the distance of miles in the nights, still felt his heart lurch as he stumbled upon something in the house they’d shared together that she had held dear, well, there he lost himself as best he could.
Writing was what he was doing that night in early March. He was writing and trying hard not to find himself sliding down into the abyss of despair, which often accompanied the morose meditation of the end of their life together. So, shaking off the thoughts of his despair, now free to pursue his writing, he tried to focus on the lyrics, which would not come flowing freely as they used to when he had been in the practice of songwriting many years ago.
#
He lost himself as best he could.
A poem he’d written about her. He couldn’t bear to open it and read it, not right then, anyway. As a matter of fact, he’d tossed it into the trash since then, forgotten about it. But he’d never forgotten about her, though, and the way she had so unintentionally and inadvertently taught me one of the first of many hard lessons to come about my life, and life in general: Of all the tall tales someone could tell you, the cruelest one is the one they call love.
Not to say she hadn’t loved him – he truly believed she did – but the overwhelming sense of loss one can feel without their loved ones around can play funny tricks on your mind. Combine that feeling with alcohol or drugs, your mind will be so clouded it’s hard telling what crazy thoughts might enter your mind at any given time.
Like the thought of taking another man’s life.
The human spirit is a strong one, but being only human, the mind, heart, and soul can only take so much abuse and loneliness before you begin conjuring up thoughts you never would have otherwise. Alex had never met anyone as unpredictable as a person who is already suffering from loneliness and a broken heart and combines that feeling with alcohol or drugs. The mind is just as fragile as the heart – if not more.
He had been on one of his three or four day drinking binges again, jotting down any random thoughts or words that normally came to mind in one of his drunken stupors, and these words hadn’t ended up in the trash can like the last batch. He very rarely tossed anything away unless he thought it wasn’t befitting of their love, and his most recent thoughts were no exception:
He spoke to her with pity and longing;
My love, my place is with you, but I cannot,
I am with the living, where I want you to be with me.
Her eyes grew clouded with transparent tears.
The words were sometimes dismal, the underlying meaning dark in nature. At times he had begun to wonder if he was dead inside, like his heart was irreversibly broken, and all that lay ahead of him were dark days and even darker nights. The words seemed befitting of their love at the time though, which instilled him with yet another sense of hopelessness. Writing to Alex had become a sort of creative outlet, a way to vent his frustrations and fill the empty void left behind by others. In hindsight, he sincerely believed that if it hadn’t been for his writing, a way to pass those long, dark, lonely nights, he would have surely lost his mind altogether.
He picked up his pen and bent over the notebook and scribbled. He paused, read it over then added another line of verse. Straightening, he read it without satisfaction, yet realized it was, if nothing else, honest.
I’m not afraid to let it flow
It lets the color in my day
He dropped the pen and it rebounded from the counter and clicked several times as it bounced and skittered on the floor. There were still forty some pills in his prescription bottle so he took two more, then crossed the room to the refrigerator and withdrew a bottle of Evian water and drank it off in one long drink. Wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, he dropped the bottle to the floor, bent and peered into the refrigerator before deciding on a Gatorade over a Bud Light. That was a good thing, but it also made him realize he was in the process of trading one addiction for another; prescription medication.
Oh God…what would Ellie think? The thought terrified him and made him feel so guilty.
But not that guilty.
He popped two more pills, chased them down with the Bud Light, and went back to his writing.
It was going to be a long night, and planning a road trip – and a murder - wasn’t easy.
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