Alone at night

Alone at Night

All I ever wanted to do was help. It’s what’s she could never understand. The fact that my charitable endeavour went awry is regrettable; I will be the first to admit that. But how can they accuse me of actually wanting to kill her? If she had not resisted, if the carbon monoxide had worked properly, if her parents had not returned to the house three hours earlier than I had expected them to, she would still be alive. If I had succeeded in saving her, she would be on her knees, thanking me for being so kind to her, for being so selfless. It’s what the police could never understand either. It does not matter what you do, as long as you have the best of intentions.

THREE DAYS EARLIER.

I heaved the bicycle into the black water with a low grunt of exertion. It sank – much too slowly in my opinion, for I was constantly on the look-out for people who were on the look-out for me – with a pathetic gurgle as it drowned. I was sad to see it ruined, but I knew that it was for the best. I didn’t want the police to find any DNA evidence.

I behaved, I am ashamed to say, as though I was guilty; as if I was conspiring to commit a horrendous crime. If there had been another man hiding in night’s cloak at that same moment, he would have heard my heart beat as distinctly as if he were listening to his own. I was suddenly terrified that I would lose my nerve, and would try to forget about saving that poor girl as a result, but then an owl hooted and I was jolted back to reality. I steeled myself, readjusted my backpack with its heavy contents, and continued my steady walk towards her lonely house.

I had spent days watching that mansion on the hill, so even in the pitch black with only her bedroom light to lead the way, I found the fuse box with ease, surreptitiously tucked away in the porch. Of course, it was locked, but my paperclip, ready for the occasion, soon took care of that. The bedroom light went out, and she and I were engulfed in total blackness. I heard a muffled shriek – perhaps she had tripped in the darkness – and I was relieved. Thank God, I thought. She’s home alone.

I edged my way to the back of her house, my gloved hands brushing against the brick. I stopped just below her balcony, and stood there for a few eternal moments, every cell in my body alert to danger. Satisfied, finally, that we were safe, I began my deliberate ascent up the drainpipe towards her bedroom window.

It was a hard climb. Every time I reached up, the drainpipe seemed to draw back, and when I did get a firm hold of it, it seemed as though it would buckle at any minute under my weight. My hands grew number by the second, and my legs ached as I tried to find a foothold in the slick ivy. Perhaps my groping hands dislodged a small stone which had struck the grass below more perceptibly than I had first assumed, perhaps I breathed too heavily with the effort to get to her bedroom noiselessly, perhaps she even smelt my determined sweat – but when I reached her bedroom, she was not there.
It was an awful mistake, I realize that now, not to have secured the doors before I hunted for her. My only excuse for my reckless actions is that I was in a panic. For a moment, I actually thought that she was trying to hide from me. I ripped her duvet from its mattress, I overturned her chest of drawers with a crash, I scrambled under her bed, I tore into her wardrobe with a vengeance – but she was not there.

A noise. It was tiny, it was miniscule, but it was definitely a noise. Neither before nor since has curiosity taken such a hold of me the way it did when I detected that slight sound. I was sorely tempted to rip through each and every room until I found her, but I resisted. The plan was crucial; any further deviation from it, and the whole thing would come crashing down around my ears. I had to remain focused. After all, her future depended on it.

I crept down the staircase as quietly as possible, as though if I were silent now, the girl would magically forget about the cacophony that had issued from her bedroom only moments before. I slunk to the front door and twisted the handle. It squealed in protest and I breathed a sigh of relief. It was locked. She was still in the house.
I scanned the crypt-like hallway for a hefty piece of furniture with which to blockade the front door. Just at that moment, like a sign from heaven, the regal grandfather clock to my left chimed midnight. I grasped it eagerly with both hands, but it would not budge. It must have been twice my weight. I set down my backpack, placed my spine against the cool wood, and pushed. With a noise reminiscent of a child screaming, it shifted. Panting, I repeated the exercise again and again until the grandfather clock completely concealed the only major escape route from the house, and, by extension, from me.

I felt calmer with the exit blocked. I bent down and unzipped my backpack, and surveyed its contents. There was the scalpel which I had stolen from the nurse’s office, which I had lovingly sharpened for hours, the heavy duty pliers which looked could twist titanium, the bottle of bleach I would use to clear up the blood, and the Tank. The Tank had once been used for deep-sea diving, but my plans for it were far more ambitious than those of holiday-makers. A long tube connected the tank to a transparent medical mask, and I rearranged my possessions so that I held both the scalpel and the mask in my left hand, with the Tank safely inside the closed backpack. Pleased that everything was in order, I advanced.

I swept into the first bathroom. An eerie light illuminated the beauty products in a harsh, anaemic glow. The open cupboard door revealed plasters, bandages, a First Aid Kit. The tap oozed a viscous liquid that was not water. And I heard the noise again. I turned sharply, banging precious body parts on various bits of bathroom furniture.

The bathroom mirror showed her for what she really was: a cowering child. She was crouching motionlessly in the narrow bathtub with her face hidden in her hands. It was quite clear that she has not seen me, and she is praying that I have not seen her. She probably thought I was going to rape her.

Ordinarily, at this point, I would have showed her the scalpel and ordered her to vacate the bathtub (I hate doing that, it makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong), but I saw the razor. It was small but very sharp and she gripped it so tightly that her knuckles had turned white. I knew the damage she could do with it. I wanted to help her so desperately, but I also wanted to live. That meant that I had to physically subdue her in the bathtub before attaching the medical mask.

I inched towards the edge of the tub. I am sure that she heard me; she shook so violently that she dropped the razor. I saw my chance and leaped in on top of her.

It all happened so fast that it was almost too much to bear. I remember I knelt on her chest to keep her from escaping. Her arms thrashed. She clawed at my face. She kicked. She sank her teeth into my hand. She fought as hard as she could to get me off of her, but it wasn’t hard enough and soon I had secured the medical mask and the carbon monoxide had sent her into a deep, blissful sleep.

When I was certain that she was sound asleep, I took off the medical mask and gazed at her. Up close, she looked even younger than I had expected. Her breath smelt of bubblegum. She was only fourteen years old.

There was no time to dawdle. I gathered her up in my arms and carried her back into her bedroom. It looked like it had been the target of a Gestapo raid, with pieces of furniture scattered everywhere and a trophy smashed on the floor, but the bed itself was clean. I thought that was a nice touch; everyone likes to wake up in familiar surroundings after an operation. I laid her on the duvet as softly as I possibly could. Her head lolled to the side in compliance, and I fancied that she had the ghost of a smile on her face.

I thought about removing her clothes with a scalpel, like they do on medical shows, but in the end I just took them off the old-fashioned way: by hand, and one by one. I folded them and arranged them in a neat pile. I am a stickler for organisation.

For instance, a feat such as this could not be carried off without a high level of organisation. It had taken weeks of careful planning. The main event itself had been meticulously researched. At first I had thought that the easiest way to purge her body of its sin would be the suction-aspiration method. I thought that all I had to do was bring a vacuum cleaner along with me, place the intake port between her legs and switch it on. And lo and behold! The monster inside her would be ripped to pieces and sucked up into the dust bag. Later, I would dump the remains behind Larry’s Fish ‘n’ Fry. But, as it turns out, one needs suction twenty nine times more powerful than the suction of an ordinary household vacuum cleaner to eradicate evil.

Eventually, I decided on the dilation and evacuation method. It seemed more basic than the suction-aspiration method. All it needed was a lot of persistency and a little strength. It seemed simple to me. With that in mind, I spread her legs apart and set to work.

I had washed the pliers beforehand, so I felt that there was no need to worry about her getting any sort of infection from them as I plunged them into her. I prodded and poked her cervix for a full minute at least (clearly the demon inside her did not want to venture out of the safety of her womb) until the mucus plug broke. It was a brown, slimy mucus that stained the sheets. It leached out of her fairly quickly and seeped into the mattress very slowly, and would continue to drip accusingly for a further twenty minutes. I hate mess. I wanted to clean it up, but I knew that there was little point. In a few moments, there would be far too much mess for anyone to clean up, and the bedclothes would have to be disposed of. Still, it is nice to wake up in your own bed.

I delved deeper into her. The textbook had said not to be finicky. This was more manual labour than medical practice, truth be told. According to the textbook (I find books more reliable than the Internet; someone has had to agree to publish it after all) it was all a matter of twisting and pulling. I took a deep breath. I reached in, imagining things breaking and blood cascading. I seized something solid and chunky with the pliers. I tugged at it. The monster resisted, it drew back, it didn’t want to come out, but I pulled and I pulled and then all of a sudden I found myself holding the mangled remnants of a foetus’ leg.

I dropped it immediately. Evil can be contagious. In fact, all I really wanted to do was shove it under her bed and leave it there to rot, but I knew that I had to arrange the body parts so that I knew when I was finished. I picked it up with the pliers and dropped it into position. Then I plunged into her once more.

I tried not to think about it too much. I concentrated on the process. Plunge. Grab. Twist. Pull. Then I had a wrecked hand in my own, complete with microscopic fingernails. I had not expected the monster to look so human, but everyone knows that the Devil hath many disguises. Plunge. Grab. Twist. Pull. The spine snapped in half with a loud crack and brought the rest of the back with it. Plunge. Grab. Twist. Pull. The decapitated head appeared last of all. Even though it was detached from its body, I still looked into its enormous blue eyes for a flicker of life. But there was no need. It was dead. I had succeeded. The girl had been saved.

I felt like I had just climbed Mount Everest. The planning, the tension, even the loss of my beautiful bicycle seemed worth it. The girl could go on to live a long and happy life without an unwanted demon ruining it. I was a hero. Exhilaration rushed through my body. I had never felt better about myself in my entire life.

I hummed as I gathered up the remains of the sin into a plastic bag. I cleaned up most of the blood with the disinfectant; perhaps the duvet could be saved after all. I dressed her with a smile. Just as a matter of course, I checked her pulse in her wrist. I could not feel anything, so, still humming, I tried her neck. There was nothing. I placed a hand in front of her mouth. She was not breathing.

My state of well-being was well and truly over. I had planned for everything but this. I tried to remember my CPR class. I pinched her nose and exhaled into her mouth. I pushed down on her chest. There was nothing. I did it again and again but there was nothing. I didn’t even know if I was doing it right. When had she stopped breathing? I had not noticed. I had been concentrating on getting rid of the demon. I had been trying to save her. I pushed harder on her chest. How long could people live without oxygen? Push. Exhale. Push. Exhale. I checked again: nothing. Push. Exhale. Push. Exhale.

Her parents’ car pulled up in the driveway. Things were going from bad to worse. I knew I had to get out of the house before they found me. I did not want to leave her, but I had to. I hoped that her parents would know what to do. I heard their key in the front door. A woman’s voice: “Harry, it’s not working, let’s just try the back door.” Push. Exhale. Push. Exhale. I heard another key, and then footsteps inside the house. A man’s voice: “Why is that light still on?” I looked down at the girl again. Her lips were blue. There was nothing more I could do. I ran to the balcony and jumped.

PRESENT DAY.

It was the carbon monoxide that killed her. I had never realised how lethal it was. I knew it was fatal – but I thought that was only in high amounts. I wish I had researched more thoroughly. But, as my grandma used to say, there is no use crying over spilt milk.

They found my shoeprint. It is truly amazing what forensics can do nowadays. They could place me at the scene of the crime, but there were no fingerprints or DNA evidence to prove that I had actually done anything. They released me after three days of interrogation, citing insufficient evidence. I am always careful like that.

But I have learnt my lesson. I will never help another girl again, however much I would like to. The sound of the foetus’ spine cracking, the remnants of the monster arranged on the bed with blood still coursing from them, the moment I realised that the girl was dead – these things will be my spectres. There is another girl on my bus with an only very slightly rounded abdomen. She would be easier to help than the dead girl; I would use chloroform instead of carbon monoxide. But, as I said, I have learnt my lesson. I only put the pliers in my backpack this morning for safekeeping.