The Meeting

She knows that everyone is unique. She can’t see it, but she knows it because she read it in a book once and there was a conviction to the words that made them stick. A value that would be of use to her. Besides, she could read the room as well as books.

She is unique. This she can see. It’s obvious that she’s different to the rest. Even her cow of a mother. Her mother thinks they are the same, but she is sorely mistaken. Her mother is a walking compromise. Unable to translate her greatness into this world. Wanting to belong in a way that dilutes her. Spoilt milk, a slick of filth swirling within her. Sickening to be around, but she indulges her mother whilst she remains of use. When the time comes, she will take great delight in pulling the rug from under her, watching her squirm in a situation of her own making. Bathing pathetically in a pain she will never recover from. Weaknesses. Always exploit the weaknesses. Attack being the best form of defence.

Revenge isn’t a dish best served cold. That implies a period of waiting and that would require patience. Vengeance is best served as a tasting menu at the chef’s table. There she can watch as the favoured guest swallows down dirt, shit and poison whilst nodding appreciation and imagining the fare to be exquisitely tasty. There is artistry in that sort of deception and so much reward. Breaking the dumb beasts in without them ever knowing that you own them in their diminishing entirety.

With a growing awareness that she was coming of age, she understood that she should take the next step in her life. She was ready. Always had been. That was her nature. Special. Better. She read the room and then changed the narrative to her liking. Now she wanted something more. It was high time.

Taking life was easy. She’d been doing it for an age. The sheeple around her gave of themselves dumbly and willingly. Even her dear mama. Getting the better of that one had been fun for quite some while. Always changing the rules of the game. Several moves ahead. Watching the clumsy bitch lumber behind her. A beast with a growing burden she had no clue she carried.

There was dark magic here. She knew that. Felt it running through her veins. She cast the spells, wove the magic and created a different world. Her world. She the spider. Around her so many tasty flies. Wrapping them up in an illusion of comfort and then sipping them dry.

She needed more. She was growing and required fuel for that growth. The tiger lived for the hunt and then she feasted. Her days of daintily supping at her kill would continue, she enjoyed that too much. Had acquired the taste for it. But she knew there was more to this chosen life of hers. A thrill that excited her even before she experienced it. She supposed that was anticipation. A dangerous feeling that she’d used often enough upon others to herd them towards her charming abattoir.

The promise was the trap. She liked to play with this and explore the guises and aspects a promise could wear. Until recently, she hadn’t ventured all that far into the physicality of her art. There had been moments. Small, pleasurable forays. Experiencing the shock of the object as she switched everything from fun and wanting, to pain and rejection. A simple, sudden, hard bite. Or a vicious pinch out of the blue. Finding the switches and levers in these boring vessels made them interesting in the immediacy. Her immediacy. Always hers to play with and control.

The next step in her evolution was a chance meeting. Or so he thought. There would be shes as well. She knew her appeal. She was special after all. And she could exude that exotic difference. Send the message of it out towards her intended. The meeting was preceded by several near encounters. She’d selected him from the off. Read his wanting. Knew he was easy pickings. She could’ve chosen a more challenging prey, but she had to start somewhere and there was fun to be had throughout the process. No rush. All the time in the world. All the world to take at her will.

He saw her without seeing her. That was another trick. To insinuate herself into the patterns of his life so that by the time she deigned to allow him closer, he would already have the hook in his mouth. There was a delight in stalking her prey that was heightened by the fact that he would be the first of many. He was a simple dish. Her palate would demand more complexity over time. She found she was actually salivating at the prospect of what was to come. A never ending buffet for her to happily visit whenever she chose. Flitting from dish to dish until she selected something that took her fancy. Men. Women. Children. They were all the same to her. Objects for her use. Only of value to her in the immediacy of that use. Then they would return to nothing. Only did they exist when she gazed upon them. When she considered them and how she could use them to sate her hunger. A hunger she convinced herself she would always control. Just as she controlled everything in her life.

The meeting took place when she decided it would take place. He would think it a fateful encounter. Meant to be. Attributing redundant meaning in an attempt to own a narrative that was all hers. She was at a self-service checkout as he walked behind her to use the next one along. She stepped backwards just at the right moment, her left elbow jutting out. He caught it and the box of eggs she’d been holding fell to the floor. He was all apologies as she knelt to inspect the damage. He joined her in kneeling. This tickled her. Her subject taking the knee. As he ineptly attempted to make amends, she looked up from one broken object to another and smiled radiantly at him. This was when he began to worship her. And he would worship her right up until the end of his pitiful life.

The smile was all it took. It firmly embedded the hook. Then it was a case of presenting him with a mirror to his desire and reeling him in. A person’s wants are ever present. They wear their greed and hold no secrets to one such as her. Her seduction of him was effortless. He gazed upon her with eyes glazed over with his wanton avarice. Making it up as he went along. Content just as long as he got what he wanted. That suited her fine. She was doing the same, only this was her game and she always won. He found her charming, but there was no charm here. He was calling into an empty cave and mistook the echoes for her.

He took her for coffee. She had hers black. There was something about milk that she found awful. Suckling from the teat of yet another dumb animal. The concept was rancid and made her blood run cold. He of course, had a latte. This meant that she would have to distance herself even further from the act of kissing him. Observing from a distance. A distance that she already occupied. Had occupied for an age. It was safer there. Removed from these things that she must use.

They talked. Which was to say that he talked and she deployed devices to make him feel heard. Used and twisted his own words to secure him. Creating fictional commonality and a story of connection via interests he thought they shared. Using words was, she knew, using them. They were one and the same. She found him dull. But the spell her words cast excited her and he responded to her excitement and made it about him, when it was always about her. Always her. There was nothing else.

As they left the café and she turned to leave, she allowed herself a momentary smile even before she saw his predictable desperation.

“Can I…” he wheedled.

She turned, presenting him with the most open and obvious invitation to a kiss he would ever experience. Even then he paused. This interested her. This brief moment where an ancient survival instinct rose up in warning. His want overriding it. A willing moth to the sacrificial flame.

The kiss was a further promise. She allowed him to give it his all. Felt his arousal. Took from him and expected more. This expectation was the real promise. The truth of what was to come. Despite herself, she enjoyed the kiss. A gateway was opening to another way of being. She was becoming more of what she truly was. He was her first. She would barely remember him. She would remember her part in it though. Her brave and bold first steps into a new version of herself.

She knew that he’d been asking for her phone number, not the kiss. When the kiss ended she gave it to him without the need for him to ask again. A gift. Her gifts always contained conditions in small print that none of them would ever read. They parted and he texted his thanks. Effusive. Eager. He asked to see her again. She delayed her responses and didn’t engage with him on the matter of their second meeting. Afforded him just enough so that he dangled on the end of her string. She would go days without texting. But when she did, he replied in an instant. The hook dug in that bit more deeply as he wanted her all the more. She was marinating him in confusion. Softening him up and readying him for what was to come.

When next they met, he was a bundle of nerves that loudly signalled his investment. She toyed with him and encouraged him to spill his guts. He would walk away with an impression that she’d reciprocated, when nothing of the sort had occurred. He’d met his soulmate. His one and only. In a way, he was right. There would be no one after her. To her, he was her first ever prey. One of many. First in the line. Faceless. Nameless. Worthless. An average meal that passes unnoticed in the required function of consuming energy and sustenance.

There was more than a kiss this time. She allowed him to go further and again played a role of reciprocation. An act that was in her touch. Surface level. Nothing more. He did the work. He made it what she wanted him to make it. Played into her stroking hands.

They were dating now. On her terms. Long silences. Lack of engagement. Treating him mean and making him as keen as he’d ever been. A protracted foreplay that interested him and nurtured in him a new belief system that would be both his prison and his downfall. She was the enigma who would sustain his interest across a lifetime and beyond. The beyond he imagined was so very different to the darkness she was intent upon bestowing as she sent wave after wave of trauma crashing into his nervous system and bound him to her even more tightly and ultimately irrevocably.

When they met, she stepped back and he stepped forward. This was her dance. She was drawing him in. Always with the promise of more. A promise that was never delivered and always required him to give more. They went further, but never far enough. They would though. This they both knew. He was oblivious to his crossed purpose. Occasionally he would sense something was wrong, attempting to wrestle with something he couldn’t define. Shadow boxing his torment, much to her amusement. When he awoke to her reality, it would be too late and she would experience the most glorious rush as he collapsed inside of himself. Never to recover. She wouldn’t allow the prospect of recovery. That wasn’t the game she was playing.

Out of breath and dizzied. He wanted her more than anything he’d ever wanted in his life. He was willing to lay bare his chest and give her everything that he was in order to have her. His life for hers. A fair bargain that he was inherently proposing each and every time they met. The well-rehearsed bargain between sheeple that was negotiated time and again in life with varying degrees of success. The gold standard; a lifetime together. She used this and twisted it to meet her needs.

They made it so easy for her. Could neither see nor believe that anyone would do what she did. They hid her in plain sight and protected her so that she could go about her business amongst them with impunity. Turned on anyone who pointed at the emperor in his nakedness. All of them cowards deserving of nothing but disdain and pain.

She denied him herself again and again. Gradually building the pressure. Confusing and unsighting him. Steeping him in the madness of lust. He thought it love, but there was none of that here. Never could be.

Then, seemingly against the run of play, she invited him back to her place. As with everything she did, the timing of this was carefully considered and constructed. This insular, single man had never told anyone about her and their meetings. No one would miss him. Better still, her mother would be at home. Would witness her triumph, and despair at her part in it. A carefully choreographed manoeuvre which signalled her supremacy and her ownership of her mother. A long standing fact that would give her much pleasure as her mother writhed in discomfort at her unwilling participation in what was to come. Her mother was accomplice and alibi. Too invested in her own mask of middle class propriety and decency to ever let slip anything. Her act well-rehearsed and convincing. A rigid structure without the grace to dance with her special daughter. Having to perpetuate the story of a loving mother and a devoted, good daughter. The good little girl grown into a dependable, fine and upstanding woman. Another secret to keep. A secret to echo what they both really were. Her mother’s loss of control would be a poison dagger in her back. Watching her scrabble at it and find it to be beyond reach would be quite the show.

She gave her first victim what he wanted and so much more. The comingling of emotions driving him beyond confusion to a state he couldn’t escape. He drank freely of the poison she gave him. The poison in the cup at her bedside and the poison of her. She didn’t tie him up. There were no physical restraints. On the face of it, he could’ve left at any time. All the same, he was caught in a trap. A trap of his own making. Too proud and ashamed to admit his mistakes. Too afraid to face reality. She knew only too well how powerful such a trap was. There was a little girl that once fell for a trap such as this. She is long gone. Drowned in shame.

On the fifth day, as she began to tire of him, she brought the knife block up from the kitchen. Walking slowly and deliberately past her mother and brandishing the knives so that her dear mama was in no doubt as to what she was about. She was about to do as she pleased and make one hell of a mess. A mess that her mother would yet again clean up. That was her place and that was what she must do.

His arousal in the face of his painful demise fascinated her. He never ceased to worship her and believe her to be special. This went beyond her imaginings, sealing the course of her future. She took her time. Allowing him to penetrate her before following suit and penetrating him again and again. It took him a long time to die. She would learn from each and every one of them as to how to extend life even as she took it from them. Prolonging their agony as it translated into her stolen ecstasy.

As he breathed his last, she grinned in triumph. She was winning her new game. A game that began with that first meeting. A game she intended to play time and time again. She wouldn’t lose. She would never be caught. She’d read about the failed serial killers who’d changed their game so they could toy with the detectives pursuing them. She found this alien and pathetic. To do this would entail valuing these meat-objects and she could never see that value.

Part of winning was repeatedly demonstrating her superiority. She was special and so much more intelligent than them. She would bring many deaths and never would they solve the riddle she posed.

And if, by some fluke, they caught her?

Well, there would be a new game then. The point of which would be the same as all her games. To draw their attentive gaze so it rested upon her. To create drama and confusion and to feed from their anguish, frustration and pain. They were all discordant musical instruments and she could play them well. Disrupt their unworthy harmony and ruin their purpose. Break them one after another and glory in the doing of it, and the winning of her game. Attacking the defenceless before they ever understood they were undone.

She laughed at the delight of it all. An unnatural cackle. Then she shouted for her mother and posed in readiness for the reaction she would receive. Her eyes unblinking and unfeeling. Pools of dark, unrelenting ice. Portals to a darkness that held many horrors to come.