Vampire "Unseen" (Vampire "Untitled" Trilogy Book 2) (10 page)

The words seemed to hover in the air, ‘It’s a Romanian problem.’ What did that mean?

“Why is Paul McGovern so special?”

The question was direct. It made Noica smile. “That is the question, Cornel. That is the million dollar question.”

----- X -----

He could kill her now if he allowed himself.

Paul was hiding behind a newspaper at the back of a bistro at lunchtime. He had grown a thick fisherman’s beard that changed his look completely, but he still wanted the newspaper to cover his face.

Sitting by the front door of the Bistro, less than fifteen feet away, was Nisha Khumari with three of her friends.

Over the past month he’d watched her in secret nearly every day. It only took a few outings to learn the basic pattern of her movements. The other times were out of compulsion. He felt like a little boy with a crush on a girl, but rather than being in love, he wanted to destroy her. He had two knives under his coat to do the deed. He could kill her at any time, but for someone as special as this, her murder and horror would take time to prepare. It wasn’t enough to simply end her, he wanted to confront her and do so in an environment where he held absolute control.

He watched.

“I’m having the pasta carbonara... Have you had it? Oh, my God, it’s amazing. The cheese sauce is amazingly creamy. I’m sure it’s so fattening but I don’t care, it’s divine.”

Her voice.

Her fucking, cunt voice.

She’d come in with work colleagues wearing her beige mackintosh and the purple beret; the coat darker over the shoulders where the rain had soaked the fabric. She sat down and swished her hair.

“Why do I always attract loser men? Honestly, urghhh, I met this guy on Saturday and he felt like, because he was buying Champagne by the bottle, that he could press up against me whilst we talked. I mean, the guy was rich and he was handsome, but O.M.G. he was creepy.”

Paul hid himself deeper behind the newspaper wishing he wasn’t so close. Her voice was grating. Her attitude was fickle and pathetic. He found it hard to contemplate that at one time he was too scared to talk to her, too in awe at her beauty and spirit to even contemplate that she would find him attractive. As he watched her now, all he could see was her ugliness. Her mean spirited character. Her flaws. Her egregious contempt for others.

“I went back and bought that Prada dress... I know, I know... it was so expensive, but I’m planning on being fabulous this weekend. Oh, my God, you should see the bikini I bought for the trip to Sharm. I look totally hot. I swear I’m going to make those Egyptian men drool. When I’m lounging by the pool, I’m going to wear that bikini and have the hotel waiters bring me drinks just so they can see what they can’t have.”

Paul couldn’t take it. He left with one hand scratching his eyebrow to cover himself as he passed her table. He looked a completely different person with the beard, but he still felt compelled to hide his face. She made him sick.

He jogged through the light rain, putting distance between them so he didn’t go back and stab her on impulse. He wanted to bleach his eyes and ears to wash away her foulness.

He wanted a drink.

He wandered into the first bar he saw, a dirty looking place that once inside he realised was a gay bar. He ordered a big shot of vodka. Drank it. He ordered a second.

Why should this girl torment him so much? Why was he following her? Why was he fantasising ways to hurt her? She was undesirable and as corrosive as acid, yet she was all he could think about. She consumed him. He knew it was creepy to stalk her, but it had a soothing effect. The aggressive outbursts and muscle contractions had become less frequent since he began watching her daily. It was as though the craziness within him needed a channel to escape. When he didn’t stalk her he found himself trapped in maladaptive daydreaming, fantasising about her as though she was in a movie running inside his head; but the make-believe nature of the movie drove him towards rage and anger until he trembled and suffered the pain of clenched muscles. She was torture. When she wasn’t there it caused genuine physical pain. When he saw her he wanted her dead. The only place of comfort was the middle ground, the time spent watching her from afar, the time spent rehearsing her death, or buying the hardware and tools that would cause her pain.

At the moment he was in what he termed decompression. The period where she had filled him to bursting point and he needed to allow the pressure to subside. He would ride it out. Emotionally he felt as though he was in the aftermath of an argument. The fight had ended, but his mind wouldn’t let it go.

He recalled the telephone conversation, which now noticeably varied in detail with every recollection.

“Hi, is that Nisha?” he had said whilst still filled with excitement and apprehension. “This is Paul McGovern... we met last night...”

Met last night? We’d drunkenly tried to fuck last night until you threw up, but I don’t mind, Nisha, because I want to be your doting boyfriend.

“...we met last night…”

“Oh, my God. You raped me!” her voice was hoarse, screeching. “I was drunk, you pig. Don’t you know that is rape? You took advantage of me and raped me!”

In the bar a man pushed past him, snapping him out of the daydream. The man smiled, Paul smiled back momentarily by reflex then went back to his drink. The decompression was incomplete. He went to lift his drink and found his right hand had formed into a fist and the muscles up to his shoulder were clenching. The drink was inches away yet totally ungraspable. No matter how much thought he gave it, his fingers couldn’t unclench and take the glass. His other hand was shaking but still had some mobility; he used his left hand to pry open the fingers of his right hand and press the palm to the bartop.

“Fuck Nisha,” he whispered with resignation. “This is your fucking fault. You make me so fucking angry I can’t even...” He grimaced as his fingers curled back into a fist.

When Nisha is dead, all this will be over. When she is gone there will be no need to struggle with my own muscles. When she is gone I won’t ever have to follow her, or have uncontrolled fantasies about her. It will be ended.

He would have some peace and mental clarity... when she was gone.

Paul left the bar for the toilet. It was at the bottom of a steep and narrow twisting staircase and it stunk. The walls were covered in gay sex graffiti. The toilet bowl had no seat, and the door had no lock. He positioned himself at the stretched urinal and began to piss, still feeling a trembling in his hands.

“Hi, how are you today?”

Paul looked both ways quickly, choking off the urination in shock. There was a man watching him. It was the same guy who had made eye contact upstairs, the man who had brushed past and smiled. He was about Paul’s age, mid twenties. He was tanned, groomed, smiling, friendly. He must have followed him down. Paul said nothing. He wanted to leave. 

“Do you want some help with that?” the man asked tilting his eyes downwards.

There was something akin to a thunderclap in Paul’s head. He had hold of the gayboy by his hair and his clothing. He was swinging him around. He spun him off his feet and crashed his back into the urinal sending him skidding down the wall into the piss soaked gutter. He raised his foot and smashed his military boot into his face. Cartilage snapped under his foot, the bridge of the man’s nose caved in. Knives under the coat. His hands went for them instinctively, grabbed them, pulled them out.

Control...

The man coughed a wretched sound in a failed scream, his whole body laying lengthwise in a gutter of piss and sanitation bricks, his nose destroyed and gushing with thick dark blood, his hands raised to cover his face.

There was a moment to think... just a moment... a fraction of time.

The injured man stared at the knives and moaned a noise of pain and horror as his hands clamped to his face, covering his crushed nose. He hadn’t deserved this.

Paul backed away carefully. At the door he turned and moved quickly up the stairs, clipping the knives to the yoke as he went. He left the pub and dissolved into the crowds of lunchtime office workers. Within seconds he blended in and disappeared.

The attack was instinctive. Sudden. There was no warning to it. He was lightening fast but at least he’d controlled it. At least he hadn’t gone into one of the knife attack patterns he’d spent a month rehearsing. From somewhere, deep in the recesses of his mind, a tiny voice had spoken the word, ‘control’.

He’d listened to that voice. He’d heard it. The poor gayboy was unlucky to have stumbled onto Paul McGovern, he was unlucky to be assaulted like that; but he was lucky to be alive. He was damned lucky to be alive.

----- X -----

Paul’s new room felt like luxury. Using the credentials of Joseph Frady he’d rented a tiny bedsit and for the first time since Romania felt he could relax.

In the days after throwing Frady off a ladder and slitting his throat, he’d visited the boy’s bank to learn he owed a few hundred pounds in overdraft. Claiming to be Frady, Paul offered to put cash into the account and put it into positive balance. He wanted to change the pin number of the card but didn’t know any of the security questions. He spun a convincing yarn of how he had just gotten clean from a long drug addiction and couldn’t remember much. The fact that he was offering cash money to clear a debt seemed qualification enough. Within weeks of killing Joseph Frady he had his bank account, credentials and National Insurance number. By using those he obtained a duplicate birth certificate and after getting a doctors surgery to validate his photograph he applied for a passport. It arrived two days ago.

Stealing the identity had proved surprisingly easy.

As a precaution he’d rented a small lock-up space that contained a bag of emergency cash, clothing, and some basic camping supplies in case he needed to run. He’d also dared to get a tattoo. It was simple, a plain single word in simple block letters from the crook of his elbow to his wrist. Sublimation.

With his beard, messy hair, grungy clothes and tattoo he looked nothing like Paul McGovern; but what worried him was the Joseph Frady identity was stolen and it meant there was always a risk that somebody would come looking for the real Frady. He needed a fresh identity built from scratch. He was working on it, but it would take time to complete. He’d found a boy named Alan Jay who had died when he was eight months old. Slowly but surely, Paul was crafting the paper trail as though Alan Jay hadn’t died. When it was complete, Paul McGovern, aka Joseph Frady, would become Alan Jay, he would move to another country and he would vanish forever.

His new life was coming together. The old life needed to disappear.

She had to die.

He had a special plan for Nisha and here in the bedsit he was putting the parts together.

A wisp of smoke rose from the circuit board as he tried to solder wire to a tiny spot on the electronics of a mobile phone. The slight tremor to his hand was making it awkward. It was an old style telephone, with buttons rather than a touch screen. He’d dismantled it, removed the rubber sheet of buttons and was trying to delicately fix two wires to the connections that pressed the receive button. The first wire was attached, the second was pissing him off.

He’d tried too many times and the board was looking burnt. He put the iron down and sat back on the sofa bed.

“Rest a moment,” he said to himself. “Rest. Calm. Quiet your mind.”

He took a few slow breaths then picked up the iron to try again and this time succeeded. He unplugged the iron and swapped it for a hot-glue gun and rested whilst waiting for it to warm up.

All of this was for Nisha. He was following plans from the internet and the project was simple enough to understand, but he wasn’t as good with his hands as he wanted to be. Dismantling and modifying electronics was a geek task unsuited to a wordsmith, but there was something refreshingly distracting about the job.

He checked the hot-glue, still not quite ready.

He sat back on the bed and cast his eyes across notes pinned to the wall. Articles printed from internet cafés. They were medical texts and papers. The link between mental illness and domestic violence. Major depressive illness and violence. Treatment for violent psychiatric disorders. Bipolar disorder and violence. Bipolar management techniques. An overview of violence and mental illness. The room was tiny but one whole wall was covered in papers. Like a schoolgirl with posters of her favourite pop star, Paul had covered one wall with posters of his chosen subject.

It felt good to read them. Studying took away the feeling of helplessness. He was working on finding a solution to his problem and his proactive approach prevented him from being at the mercy of the illness.

He’d read hundreds of articles so far. None of them described what he had. There were overlapping factors, but nothing really came close to his unique ailments. There was a positive side to the illness in that he felt stronger, fitter and more agile than ever, except for when his muscles clenched. Mentally he felt sharper. When he wasn’t locked in repetitive violent thoughts he felt really smart and alert. Sometimes it felt as though the good outweighed the bad.

The worry was the spontaneous outbursts of violence. He’d killed Nealla and Raul in Romania, then killed Joseph Frady. He’d assaulted a boy in the park, molested his girlfriend and broken the nose of a man in a gay bay. The only reason he hadn’t done more damage was he’d deliberately avoided people, but that couldn’t go on indefinitely. It would be his downfall. He couldn’t expect to unleash this kind of uncontrolled rage and not get caught. Eventually he would end up in a confrontation with the police.

It was all Nisha’s fault. Once she was dead this would go away. There wouldn’t be the nagging devil sitting on his shoulder, teasing him, annoying him, constantly whispering in his ear and driving him to violent acts.

He stroked the tattoo, still tender, the flesh still flushed pink around the black letters.

Sublimation.

For Ildico.

The hot-glue was ready. It took only a second. A few drops of glue onto the solder joints to reinforce them. He could reassemble the hacked telephone now. It would work exactly the same, but now, instead of pressing a button to send a text or receive a call, he would have to touch two wires together.