Circus

The man in the doorway smiles as the screams rise from the basement below. A sickly sweet smell accompanies the screams and reminds the man of cotton candy. He wets his lips by licking them. The smell of cotton candy is mixed with the faint odor of wet mold and piss. This doesn't bother him though, for his mind is like a Ferris-wheel (sans operator) spinning round and round. The only time it slows is when something gets stuck in the gears. He use to do drugs, like all the other "cool" guys, but one day when forced with the decision to act or not to act, he had hesitated; nearly loosing his right eye when the woman retaliated. And because he had failed to pull the trigger on his silenced 9MM, he'd had to settle for the messy way instead. He pushed her in front of an oncoming bus. And SMACK! That was all she wrote. Just like many times before, the Man had gotten away, but today had been different. Somewhere along the way, he'd killed the wrong person; he'd killed a cop.

He'd had this planned for six months, the first three spent taking pictures of the target, the other three had been spent buying supplies around the city (so as not to be too conspicuous) and setting up the base of operations. This was all by the book (If there had indeed been a "How to perform the perfect kidnapping: For Dummies"). And there was never a plan B. If something were to go wrong, say, the target getting loose, or his cover being blown, the Man would simply kill the target and dump the body. He would never be caught by chance, because the body/bodies would never be found. Amateurs often disposed of the bodies in lakes and rivers, or just buried them someplace, where K-9 units could sniff them out. But the Man didn't bury them in just any place; he buried them in a graveyard. Needless to say, the Man knew a guy.

The targets name was Leah Morgan. She was around 5'6, tight little body, long auburn hair and she liked tattoos. From what the man could see she had two on her left arm and one on her right bicep. The one on the right had caught his attention that day in the mall. She had been wearing a black halter top and a pair of faded blue jeans with a tear in the right knee. As he'd been watching her from a distance, she'd leaned forward to grab something and her hair had fallen away, revealing the tattoo. It was of a lion's face, split in two halves. On one side the lion had a serene look, starry eyed, almost like a kitten, but the other side was the complete opposite. The other side of the lion's face was roaring fiercely, its one eye burning with primal hate. It looked like the snarl of a demon. This compelled to the Man. He had never picked a target for reasons as mundane as a tattoo, but there was always a first time for everything.

Leah had been easy to follow. As it turned out, she only went to three places, home, mall and the video store around the block from her house. He had take his pictures and planned out the when and where's, and somewhere in between the peeping and the stalking, the Man fell in love. And that ladies and gentlemen is how it all fell apart.

(May 20th, 7:30 PM)

The Man is standing in the rain wearing black boots and a grey poncho. His hands are pumping themselves into fists then relaxing, fisted, slack. The only sound he makes is what he wants to make, and only he can hear it. He has been watching her for the last hour and a half. She came home, threw her purse and shopping bags on the kitchen table, then, crossing the room, she began to strip her clothes off. Never in his entire life had the Man seen clothing fit so perfectly on a body. A black lace bra, with pink trim, and lace panties with the same colours inverted. He watched her cross the living room and enter her bedroom, all this seen from the window by the backdoor in the kitchen. The entire house, save for the bedroom and bathroom, was connected. Fifteen minutes went by and then a car pulled onto her street. At first the Man didn't pay any attention to it, even when he realized that it was an unmarked Impala being used as a squad car, but when it slowed and pulled into her driveway he tensed. Why were the police here and why now? This was inconceivable. He'd had it all planned out! The when and where's! The Ferris-wheel was spinning like a class five hurricane now. The man moved around the house to get a better look. The cop shut the squad car off and opened his door. As he stepped out, the Man grinned. The Golden Boy, he thought to himself. The guy walking to the door couldn't have been older than 21. Short, curly blonde hair seemed to bounce on his head as he walked. His skinny, muscular body filled the out the uniform awkwardly. He looked like he would have made a great NARC, in jeans and a bullet-proof vest, but instead he sported the beat-cop blues. He looks a little like that one actor guy, what's his name? The Fast and Furious... Paul Walker? Yeah, that was it. He nodded and watched on. The cop knocked on the door, three sharp raps. Typical cop knock. The man could see through the living room window. Leah came running to the door, now wearing a tight black dress. She opened the door. The cop said something about there being a disturbance and then Leah grabbed him and pulled him inside, kissing him as she did; and for one brief moment, before the rage took over, the Man thought to himself, "What, a disturbance in his pants?"

Then he'd gone blank... When he'd come around, he was in the house and Leah was cowering in the corner with her arms covering her head. Her sobs unnerved him. Someone with something as beautiful as that lion tattooed on their skin should have been able to keep their cool, but here she was, the woman he been following for the last six months, the woman he loved, balling her eyes out. He moved towards her, Leah pulled her legs up to her chest with a grimace and started rocking back and forth. The man noticed that she was wearing a pair of black heels. One had been broken, but the other -3 inches- was still intact. He thought this was strangely sexy. Then he blanked out again...

This time when he awoke, he was back at the house (his) and Leah was on the kitchen table, unconscious. He had no idea how he had gotten from her place, across town and to his place, without getting busted. And what had happened to the cop/boyfriend. He didn't know, but he had a feeling it would all come back to him soon enough.

Leah moved on the table and moaned a little as she slowly began to come around. The Man walked over to the table and put a hand over her mouth. Her eyes opened wide and stared up at her captor with a horror. He was a big man, maybe around 6'5, and very wide, like a Center Guard for the NFL. His own face loomed above hers, a handsome face without a doubt, but she knew, from the blank look in his eyes and what she had seen him do to Christian –poor Christian- that she was at the mercy of a complete monster.

The man backhanded her when she started to scream for help, knocking her unconscious again. He then lifted her up off of the table and onto his shoulder. One arm was wrapped around her, so that she would stay in place and the other was on her thigh, below her left buttock. He felt the bulge form under his poncho, but thought nothing of it. He wasn't a pervert after all. He moved his hand to a more appropriate place, then he carried her to the doorway of the basement and then down the stairs. The scents of his childhood forced themselves on his mind like a rapist. This had once been his home, now it would be hers. Once downstairs he carried her to the far corner of the room and dropped her onto the bed he had made up. She made no signs of waking. He really didn't want to have to hit her again. The Man turned away from her and looked over the room that had served as his prison for most of his childhood. The walls were covered with patches of wallpaper depicting clowns and animals and smiling children. It was a circus. Over the years, pieces of the wallpaper had fallen off, or just worn away, but the Man had tried his best to keep it the way it had been all those years ago. In the places where the wallpaper had fallen away, the man had painted it in. But it never came ended up looking quite right. The Man's tortured mind associated the circus scene with his horrendous past, so when he filled in the spots, they were reflections of the aforementioned mind. Next to Leah had been a scene of a clown making different kinds of balloon animals for a small group of children. A bright and cheery sight, the kind of thing you see at every circus. But the wallpaper had fallen away and in its place was a not so likely replacement. The same clown, using the same blowing technique, had been repainted, only, instead of rubber balloon animals, he was using the intestines of the children to make his art, and said children were lying in a bloody heap next to the clown's balloon stand.

There were more newly painted scenes as well. In one, the bearded lady was being sodomized by a goat. In another, a snake charmer was using his own severed penis as a flute and charming the pants off of (quite literally) a group of young girls. The man's twisted carnival of disassociated madness was only about 20% realized on these walls; the rest of it festered in his mind, like a hive of frantic, hungry maggots. And like the maggots, his disease was slowly eating his brain.

Leah moaned again, but this time in her sleep. The Man left her there and went back upstairs. There was no need to restrain her he thought. The Man had noticed while she slept upstairs that she had broken her ankle sometime during the blackout.

Once upstairs the Man went into the living room and turned on the TV. He leaned back in his lazy chair and sighed. Cartoon Network. Click. Some rap video with an annoying teen flashing his gold toothed grin. Click. Gross Point Blank. He hesitated, and then changed the channel again. Now the news. The man leaned forward in his chair so fast that he almost went headfirst through the television set. His van was on the screen, then a picture of the Paul Walker cop, then a sketch of himself. His blood felt as if it had frozen in his veins. The woman on the TV was saying that the Paul Walker cop was dead. He'd been found at Leah's house, stabbed to death, and mutilated. At first his mind was a blank, but after a moment of concentration it started to come back to him, at first, only as a fuzzy image, but then it came to him in waves of information, which he welcomed with his entire being.

He could see Leah pulling him inside and kissing him, the Man's entire world now under-siege by rage. The Ferris-Wheel had come to a screeching halt. Then he'd blanked out, but now he remembered, he remembered everything. Before Leah had been able to close the door, the Man's hand was clasped on the top and was pulling backwards until it made a whining noise and ripped from its frame. Then he was inside. Leah was screaming and backing away, pulling Paul Walker cop with her. Then she tripped and as she fell, she took him with her. The Man reached inside the pocket of his poncho slowly and removed a box cutter. Leah and her boyfriend were on the ground, in what looked like the missionary position. The Man dived onto the back of Paul Walker cop, (in the process of doing so, broke Leah's ankle) and crushed them both. Now in control, The Man pushed the blade of the box cutter out of its metal cradle and plunged it into the back of the man under him. Paul Walker cop let out a howl of surprise and pain and tried to squirm around. The Man thought that they looked like they were fucking. He laughed to himself and ripped the box cutter down at a sideways angle, so hard that, when he pulled the blade out, the dead cop's shoulder blade plopped out of the wound. Leah was still screaming, even louder now that her dead boyfriend's blood was forming a pool of blood around them. The Man grabbed the dead cop and flipped him onto his back and then he -

There was a pound on the door, followed by, "L.A.P.D, Open up! Open up, now!" The Man stood to his feet and looked towards the door. There had been more but what - Then it hit him and he reached into the pocket of his poncho. What he removed made him smile. It was Paul Walker cop's face. "L.A.P.D, Open up, asshole!" The Man's world was slowing down again, the Ferris-wheel grinding to a halt. He walked into the kitchen and took off his poncho. Underneath it he had been wearing nothing but the demon lion's snarl that covered the breast over his heart. Leah started screaming again.

Behind him he can hear the police trying to break down the door, but he doesn't care, he doesn't care because -

The man in the doorway smiles as the screams rise from the basement below.

"Daddy, Daddy, I'll be good, I promise!"

"Please let me out of here, daddy, I think mommy's bleeding!"

"Daddy!"

The infamous SWAT team breaks down the door and enters the Man's house like a swarm of angry black bees. They storm through the living room and into the kitchen, but he's already walking down the stairs, his silenced 9MM in his hand.

"There is no plan B." He says and turns the corner, raising his gun.

Leah's not on the bed. He turns, eyes scanning the room, running over his macabre paintings, then stopping on Leah, who is leaning up against the wall just around the corner. He didn't plan on hesitating this time, just shoot the bitch and then kill as many of the cops as possible, but he did hesitate, and he knew there wouldn't be any convenient busses around to finish the job for him. Not this time. He loved her. Not like his daddy had loved him or his mommy, but a genuine kind of (psychotic) love. He opened his mouth to tell her this, but she opened hers first, "I hope you rot in hell, you sick mother fucker!"

Then she was lunging at him, her arm flew at his face and in her hand was the 3 inch heel. The Man fell to the ground, and Leah jumped on top of him. She stabbed the heel into his eye and then shoved with all of her weight until she felt it plunge into the decaying rot that was his brain. A gush of blood and clear liquid erupted from the wound as she pulled the heel back out, this was accompanied by a squishy PFFFT sound that she would later describe as a "brain queef." The Man threw her off of him and pushed himself to his feet with a mirror shattering shriek. When he got to his feet he managed to fire three shots in her direction, one of which caught her in the shoulder, sending her to the ground with a yelp, before the SWAT team opened fire on him. Leah Morgan watched from the corner, as her captor was mowed down by a barrage of gunfire.

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This was one of the happiest moments of her entire life. And deep down, in some hidden chamber of her mind, she thought the gunfire sounded like roaring lions.

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... The End