8888
By Bobby Baneravage
I wanted to write something a little more adult this time with the idea of relaxed morals and an inversion of expectations from men and women. I’ll probably do a few more revisions, but I’m not sure if there’s too much cringe and I crossed lines I shouldn’t have, or didn’t need to, lol. You’ll see what I mean. Let me know what you think. I just got around to starting Chapter 2.
I’ don’t know if formatting will get messed up, but I’ll just copy in paste. There’s only 13 or 14 pages I think.
“The clues serial killers often leave behind are not the result of mistakes, but attempts made by the last remnants of their humanity to expose that which has taken them over.” – Detective Jake Kensington, Royal Canadian Mounted Police
Prologue
Lions Gate Hospital, Vancouver, British Columbia – November 11th, 2112
I will never forget the time my girlfriend and I saw the freshly spray-painted number on the wall of the women’s restroom at the Red Chimaera, or understand why Detective Jake Kensington concluded she had been responsible for the gruesome murder we discovered there, along with over forty others spread out across Lynn Valley the previous winter.
My name is Lakken Lockyear. I suppose I’m writing this whole account in order to… as a last ditch effort to figure it out for myself. But, even after organizing my thoughts, completing this report, and lifting my pen off the paper for the final time, I still find myself more confused and furious than ever before. Scarlet was innocent!
I firmly believe she became the target of someone we both knew, but of this I cannot be certain. What I am sure of is… even though the deaths have stopped, the real killer is out there somewhere. Whether it be a close acquaintance, who frequently met with us to have drinks at the discotheque once my shift there had ended, a corrupt officer of the local police force, which arrived at the scene much sooner than expected that horrible night, or some other demented citizen… let me be clear. This sick individual still roams among us.
If anyone is willing to read my story, I hope they can spare some of their precious time to help me unravel this mystery, so I can personally thank them for saving my sanity, as I have no one else to turn to, and am now at my wits end.
Chapter 1 – Fulcrum
Scarlet and I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. We first met after a high school graduation ceremony, at a secret party being held by Ricky Walraven. He had dropped out of Edgewood during the eleventh grade, but still deemed a celebration bash for a bunch of his old classmates necessary anyway. And, though we were still students at the time, our names made it on his list.
The group Ricky invited didn’t seem like those we thought should be in his social circle. We were surprised he even had one. Unlike him, they appeared to understand the importance of a traditional education, dressed nice, and were quick to show us the latest fads they could afford and owned, including Panazon’s newest communicator, the Vocordex. A sublingual device, it was inserted in the frenulum after a simple and painless operation performed by a qualified company technician for no additional cost after purchase.
Apparently, connecting to anyone in the world was a breeze with the implant due to powerfully advanced and dedicated geosynchronous satellites orbiting the planet, but, when I asked one of the guys to give us a demonstration, he shrugged and said ‘Ricky told us to keep them turned off while we’re here until further notice because they interfered with his project.’ Then he explained how Ricky told him about his folks… how they ‘had gotten tired of his ways.’ Without as much as a trifling fuss, they moved out of the house one day, leaving behind for him a modest, but contemporary, flat-roofed residence constructed centuries earlier on the outskirts of the city.
We almost felt bad for Ricky when we first arrived because the guests declined to engage him in any meaningful way, but we didn’t as we knew him better than they ever could. Or, so I thought. He had been standing on the staircase overlooking the main room without visible expression when we walked in, then mustered a timid smile when he saw us, greeting Scarlet and myself with his trademark wave, a fist which sprouted splayed fingers after a quick snap of the wrist. For all intents and purposes, it implied or alluded to something more than a typical welcoming gesture should, but we ignored it as we were used to most of his eccentricities.
As we walked around and introduced ourselves, Scarlet and I felt the group become increasingly disinterested with us, especially when Ricky tried to blend in. When they bragged about their scholastic achievements, discussed colleges they planned to attend that fall, and reiterated their worthless dreams, we retreated to a corner and drank heavily, bonding in full observance to a collection of bizarre, suggestive paintings covering the walls. I don’t want to bore you with too many insignificant details, as I see them, so I’ll get right to it. It didn’t take long before we both realized, through an affable and forthcoming conversation, and perhaps eased out of us by the strange, erotic art our eyes couldn’t stray from… we had been fucking Ricky when the other wasn’t around since the eighth grade.
The funny thing was, neither of us felt bad about our confessions, nor hated the other because of them. In fact, they brought us closer together.
Ricky was different. Sure, he had been built from the same blocks that exemplify your usual nihilistic introvert, but he never flaunted selective outrage towards authority, struggled with flimsy notions of always being misunderstood, or lacked self-confidence… traits Scarlet and I saw in so many other boys. His uninspiring academic credentials had been replaced with a most remarkable attribute—a startling practicality that enhanced more unique… important talents. And this alone made him more enticing than everyone else we knew. In my honest estimation, he grew up to be an athletic nerd… a delightful asshole.
He was the type of guy who’d lay in bed next to you and solve crypto-quips with a pen, instead of vigorously cuddling to the romantic flick or psychological thriller I brought over to watch after finishing one of his wacky rehearsals. He was the type of guy who’d passionately read a beautiful sonnet he had written for your sixteenth birthday, then take you out to dinner at a fancy restaurant and run red lights at every other intersection just to freak you out before you got there. He was the type of guy who faithfully went to church every Sunday and accepted Communion, even after being reminded before he stepped in line behind others on a red-carpeted aisle, he wasn’t under the graces of the Holy Spirit.
But I digress. To make it short, Ricky was the type of guy we wanted to roll with—figuratively and literally. Despite his shortcomings… basically, his imperious attention to mood and propriety when it came to our acting careers, he carried himself well. And his perceived shyness, I assure you, was no disability. Rather, it added to his mystique.
As we downed enough whiskey highballs to score runs twice over, Scarlet and I often compared personal romps we had with the host, joking about the crazy things he did to us and asked us to do for him. Ricky hadn’t been concerned we were chatting, but I figured it had to be because he fancied getting with both of us later to perform another ‘fantastic script he put together’, and, therefore, wanted us to get to know each other better. When the rest in the room, about a dozen hopeless males—though several were cute, exhausted themselves boasting about their mediocre accomplishments and made no further attempt to converse with either of us directly, we giggled in agreement when Ricky led another of the group to his room for some reason, after asking the poor guy, ‘Do you want to see something cool?’ Despite the strange places he took us in the woods, and the weird outfits he begged us to wear from his Closet of Sin—kitten or bunny costumes cleverly stitched over crotch-less, easily ripped, black latex undergarments, Ricky had been the only guy we ever slept with who actually knew how to eat pussy.
One specific tale Scarlet told me after we left the party, however, scared the hell out of me and made me think he might have been connected to her disappearance. It’s why we made a pact to get away from him as far as possible.
Our parent didn’t care.
We had gotten so ridiculously drunk and were talking so much about Ricky at the gathering, we didn’t realize our meek surroundings had dwindled considerably. By the time we came to our senses, everyone else had wandered off to his room. When we decided to investigate, wondering if he had hired a stripper to entertain his friends, or brought over the neighborhood slut, Sadie Hutchinson—an ugly, ignominious girl, who allegedly loved to give virgins blowjobs purely to experience their initial reactions upon ejaculation, he bitterly slammed the door behind him, emerging into the main area with an aberrant, undecipherable disgust. I wanted to argue with him for avoiding us the entire time, but Scarlet intervened and covered my mouth when I got the nerve to do so, telling him… ‘Maybe the spell will work for you after we’ve left.’
I had no idea what she meant.
Once we were far enough away from the house, Scarlet told me she went to see Ricky a week earlier, while his parents were out for an anniversary engagement. According to her, it was a few days before final exams and she needed refreshment from study. She thought he must have forgotten they were supposed to meet and slam in the hot tub on the porch in the back yard. Well… when he didn’t show up at the designated spot, she snuck to his room. The door was slightly cracked.
Now Scarlet and I were not novices when it came to experimentation of a sensual nature. We never disapproved of or rejected Ricky because we often found ourselves the beneficiaries of his uncanny, carnal proclivity when it involved certain pleasurable actions. But this guy… this fucking guy—I swear. He was filthy on a whole other level.
Before I explain what happened next, let me say this again… Ricky wasn’t stupid. Yeah, he abandoned school and all that, but he really liked to learn. Scarlet told me of his interest in occult teachings. Through extreme fasting, meditation, and other measures, he acquired the skill to go beyond the edges of our sphere of existence and gain an awareness of dark thresholds immune to the senses of regular people.
He became frustrated, though.
The work Aleister Crowley, Peter Carroll, and countless others produced… people I had never heard of, dissatisfied him because they never went far enough. Ricky wanted to develop a unique brand of abstract diabolism—something which he alone could be considered the only competent, successful, and supreme practitioner of… and, something which would allow him to emancipate the being he believed was trying to interact with him from deep in the ground under the floor of his bedroom. In his opinion, Scarlet stated, ‘the Golden Dawn, Church of All Worlds, Typhonian Order, Satanism, Discordianism, and everything else connected to them, or in-between, were absolute garbage and should be either thrown in the trash can, or flushed down the toilet. He thought this because each system underestimated the minds of the individuals they depended on, and in doing so became irrelevant the moment they were imagined.
Scarlet said Ricky was buck naked and stroking himself in a mirror surrounded by shelves of designer shoes and a silver ring of ribbon wreathed candles in the center of the room so obsessively when she looked in that she had to back away from what she saw. When she peered in again, though, enthused by the dirty, audible thoughts of some articulate sex-magic ritual he had initiated, she became a willing participant to something truly tasteless. Once Ricky was happy with the length he had attained, he went over to his bed and took several strips of fur, which he had butchered from his mom’s expensive chinchilla coat with hedge clippers, and slipped them into a cotton sock. After he placed his erect rod inside and pulled up a pair of flexible, Adidas jogging pants around the stiff bulge, he stuffed bath towels into them, until it looked like… and I kid you not, a log sticking out nearly three feet.
There was a flat screen on the wall and he turned it on. An attractive blonde with a goofy smirk gazed back at him, her small, unassuming chest thrust forward, but paused. Ricky looked over to an industrial paint can shaker he had bolted to the wall. Fastened to it was the head of a mannequin he must have lifted from Victoria’s Secret or some other local department store—her mouth gaped, the fake hair of a wig he had fashioned in one way or another, spooled on the floor.
Ricky turned back to the picture on his television, then gathered some blankets, neatly arranging them sideways into a clump on a shabby, stained mattress set on a depression in the carpet. As he wielded a remote and got ready, he positioned his absurdly shaped pelvis against the blankets, then turned vertically, so his private parts became the pivot for the most sad and pathetic display Scarlett had ever seen, or so she said.
Ricky balanced himself with both arms on the perverse pedestal, then turned up the volume using the remote and resumed the video. As the chest of the woman on the screen slowly expanded and her thin shirt stretched to reveal her cleavage, his waist writhed with an awkward rhythm, until it was vehemently humping stacked blankets as if they were physical flesh. While he enunciated words in an unfamiliar language, and the candles blazed with a purplish flame, a button popped off the woman’s blouse. Then another.
Then the blonde-haired bitch’s humongous tits inflated to titanic proportions, and her silky, see-through bra snapped. A contact slid out of Ricky’s eye as two magnificent, smothering mounds of flesh the size of bowling balls burst from their constraints, tumbling out in a manner that deserved perfect appreciation. Ricky was happy to oblige. The woman squirted lotion over breasts already gleaming under the studio lighting, then playfully rubbed them until both glistened with equivalent intensity.
She mocked him for indulging in such enjoyment, wondering aloud if her viewer had even ever felt the warmth of a woman before. Ricky laughed, listening attentively to her insults while she plucked the top off the plastic container in her hand, then delicately arched her back, so she could pour out the rest of the lightly-scented, anti-microbial lotion over her body and watch it slowly flow down her curves like the melted wax of the candle sticks in the room. Impervious to her threat he’d become a prisoner to disease and fantasy forever should he proceed with his endeavor, Ricky’s lower parts continued automatically. He strained to keep his eyes open and steady, lest he’d miss something crucial should he blink.
It was the only time, Scarlet told me she had ever felt sorry for him.
But the woman on the screen wasn’t enough for Ricky. Determined to tend his libido, he pushed through a half-blurred vision of excellence, then yanked the blankets out his pants, so he could proceed hurriedly to the contraption he had assembled on the wall. After inserting his ultra-soothed, sock-covered extremity inside, he switched on the pneumatically-charged apparatus. When the woman on the screen saw this, she licked her lips and wailed capriciously and the machine’s pretty attachment shook with such surreal speed, Ricky let off a forceful shout seconds later.
‘Eerily, I heard the woman on screen insinuate that even she had not seen such depravity before,’ Scarlet said.
Sweat-laden and giddy, Ricky released a gratifying sigh and smiled lazily. Then he turned off the television and the machine, removed a cum-soaked sock from his pants, and threw it by the closet door on the other side of the room, where a stereo, tool kit, broken telescope, weight bench, and other furniture had been cluttered into a chaotic heap.
‘Her moan could conquer any man,” he must have thought,’ Scarlet said, possibly replying to some misplaced, internal feeling.
Then, and this is what scared me… Scarlet said Ricky looked at his image in a large oval mirror and loudly promised the bimbo he had just finished masturbating to, with a precision only a psychopath could grasp, in particular, that he was going to violently kill every woman he had ever known to appease her, before collapsing to sleep on the mattress surrounded by candles now flickering with their original radiance.
‘He was so far away from love,’ Scarlet said, lighting a cigarette as we staggered down the street.
‘Well that’s an understatement,’ I mumbled, suspecting she had been withholding information from me as she hailed a cab for us.
While we rode home, Scarlet assured me she would handle Ricky. She paid my fare, then apologized for words not spoken, knowing full well I knew there was a lot more she wasn’t telling me. I stepped out of the cab and saw her smile changed to a frown through the back-seat window. The car dissolved into a miniscule speck as it drove away under the lavender lights lining a vanishing road.
We left for Vancouver the next day.
Chapter 2 – Undercurrent
Dane County Regional Airport – Six Miles Northeast of Madison, Wisconsin
Around 7:00 PM, after we told our parents we were taking a trip out of the country for summer break to see the world and consider future aspirations, and they encouraged us to have fun without giving a hug, kiss, or even a simple goodbye, we got on Delta flight 222. The stewardess looked at us like we were fugitives when she saw us, since we carried no luggage, and probably still looked hungover, but didn’t feel the need to press us any further once we showed her our tickets. With nothing more than the clothes on our backs, and the little amount of money we had remaining in our purses, we took our seats by the right wing of the aircraft, separated from all other passengers by a few rows of empty seats on all sides, and waited to depart. As I watched the plane race down the tarmac and lift into the sky, her reflection prompted me to turn my head and her eyes met mine. We had about seven hours and I had so many questions.
Before I could ask a single one, however, she pre-empted me with a flurry of description.
‘I went to see Ricky today,’ she said, ‘around 2:00 PM.’
I tuned back to the window, rightly pissed off about her rudeness, but eager for interpretation and enlightenment, and one of the swirling clouds outside had temporarily changed to form a pattern I could recognize—a wretched face with horns.
Scarlet touched me on the shoulder and I flinched.
I looked out the window again, before she grabbed my arm, and the face was gone.
‘Are you listening to me?’ she asked.
I scrambled through my bag for a stick of gum, removed a wrapper which seemed glued on extra tight, and bit down until the sensation of cinnamon smacked my brain.
‘Yeah,’ I told her, using my peripheral vision to check the sky.
She didn’t stop talking until I fell asleep.
‘
‘
