To indulge one's nature

The knife felt heavy in the young man’s pocket, the sound of his heartbeat thundered tremendously in his ears, obscuring his already muffled footfalls with each racing thump that sent adrenaline stars to dot the corners of his vision. His hands twitched, each finger joint stiffly moving with anticipation. It was all that he could to do keep his breathing quiet, even with the help of the old, dusty scarf that he looped about his neck and drew up to partially obscure his features. It was an ugly old thing and one that he knew nobody would associate with him and so it felt almost as perfect a cover as the night itself was offering him.

Julian was too young to be stalking the night like that, really. He had barely reached adulthood, barely even kicked the more juvenile habits of his boyhood – why, he still grimaced at the taste of wine, a fact his elder brother made quite sure he knew was the mark of a child – and yet there he was, keeping to the shadowy corners that the flickering light of the gaslamps failed to quite reach. He wasn’t entirely fond of being out there himself, either, but everyone did say he had a sense about him that he would murder somebody some day and so he felt it was far better to just go and get it out of the way. Just ticking it off the bucket list or what have you. 

They were right, after all. There was something to him, his blood having been tainted by something dark, or a heart that beat even when the rest of him was dead, and so it seemed only natural to assume it would lead him down a dark path. It had in the past, so there was no reason the future needed to be some outlier of grand moralistic reformation. Unlike his friends, he was never very fond of the obligation of gazing upon women and discussing why it was her dark curls or rubied lips made her the object of desire or why it was that the curves of her body meant he was supposed to feel anything more than a mild repulsion. No, he would much rather like to see what might come from trailing the business end of a blade across the woman’s abdomen, her screams coming as music to accompany the desecration, one hand slipping deftly into the wound to draw out what lay beneath and let all that lay inside the twitching figure that ought not be seen come into view. He could almost taste the spray of blood when he let his thoughts wander this way for too long before reigning it back again with a blush.

But if he got the whole murder business out of the way sooner rather than later, he could say it was done and so would not have to do it again. After all, he did know he wasn’t supposed to be having these thoughts and so getting it out of the way was the best way to ensure he would not need to do it again.

As if it was as easy to kick a habit as it was to form one. 

It was wrong, he knew that. He had heard the way his father tsked his disapproval of some unsolved murder he read about in the newspaper. He had overheard the topic dragged up by some gaggle of gossips and treated as some great scandal, and he knew that one really ought to avoid a scandal whenever they could. The scandals of others were interesting enough, but it would not do to get involved in one’s own.

But if there was nobody around to see him, there would not be anybody alive to spark the flames of a scandal, and so all would be well. 

Well, for him, at least. There would be some family or another left with the terrible business of mourning and funeral preparation and all that, and while the idea alone sent a flurry of premature guilt to obstruct his resolve, it never did last quite long enough to have any real impact. 

The sound of a second set of footsteps drew the young man out of the labyrinth his thoughts had created for him.

A young woman, perhaps a year or so his senior, seemed to be blissfully unaware of the danger she was in, more invested in her task of getting home before it grew too late in the evening to consider that it was not her family’s annoyance at her lateness that should be her greatest concern. One of her gloved hands was busy with the task of holding her speckled powder yellow skirts up from dragging too much against the grimy cobblestones, while the other clutched a little bouquet of late-season flowers to her chest with the fondness reserved for the gifts from a lover. She was perfectly distracted in her happy little thoughts of courtship and spring dances that the world seemed a wonderfully good and kind place to be wandering.

It would have been easy to let the woman keep to these illusions. To let her just carry on her way home, possibly share the story of a chaste kiss or two with her friends come the morning, and never know how close she truly came to having this stolen away from her entirely. This would have been the right thing to do, and it would have proven the cruel accusations that had been tossed towards the young man, and yet there was something to the moment that seemed to play out so well for him that Julian felt as though it would make a coward of him not to go through with it. 

There was such an ease to the way the knife, a little pocket knife that had been given to him on a whim several years ago, slipped from his pocket and dropped into his palm. It felt less like he was carrying a tool and more that it was an extension of his very being, completing him in a way that he never fully acknowledged under the sterile daylight. He could already imagine the steel sticky with cooling blood, and the mere thought of it alone was enough to send his breath hitching. 

He could not give the game away too early and risk scaring the woman away. His pace grew from his leisurely stride to something just a smidge faster, reducing the space between the two of them more and more without seeming to be anything more worrying than a fellow evening-wanderer. The impatience was the real struggle, but the moment drew nearer and nearer with each passing second until he was free to strike. 

The opening to a little alleyway served as the perfect cover for his dastardly, wicked desires. The woman just that little bit too close, the opportunity made too perfect for him to let it slip away. Julian pounced before he had the time to second guess himself, one hand wrapping itself around the woman’s mouth before she had the opportunity to cry out in alarm, the other awkwardly wrapping about her body to try and prevent her arms from flailing about without prematurely acquainting her with the knife, half pulling half staggering them into the alleyway.

Even with her arms captured, the woman was certainly not going to make this easy for him though, squirming and writhing as best she could to try and get away. 

He would like to claim that he had thrown her to the ground with some mad glee, but the truth was slightly less interesting. The woman had stomped her heel down hard on his foot and he had dropped her, her skirt hem caught under her foot in a way that caused her to trip in her attempt to pull away. 

But either way, she did end up trapped on the ground and that was the more important part.

So, the young man dropped down, knees to either side of her to make it more difficult to escape. She was saying something, presumably some plea to let her go, but he could not hear her over the roaring of his blood in his ears. 

It was only going to be a one-time affair and so he did not want to spoil the moment by rushing into it – was that not what they said about courtship? – and so, the man raised the knife, took all of a moment to try and steady his breathing before slamming it down hard into the woman’s shoulder. 

Truthfully, for all his imaginings of the deed, he did not know what to expect. What he did know, however, was that it was not like he was hoping for at all. The tip struck bone, grating against it in a way that sent an uncomfortable sensation shocking up his arm and down his spine. The blood was warm and sticky and felt unpleasant against his skin. The woman’s screech held none of the ecstasy that he had imagined it would, instead it just held some primal sound of suffering that left him wanting to clap his hands over his ears to drown it out. 

He only now properly saw the woman, chestnut hair and the flowers that had fallen from her hand as she, herself, fell leaving her reminiscent of Ophelia, the dusting of fine freckles that decorated her face and the spray of her own blood leaving constellations across her features. He had expected her dark brown eyes to be lit with the same want, the same lust that he felt, but what stared up was such a hatred, made all the more bitter from the fear that fought it for dominance, that the man faltered.

It was wrong. 

It wasn’t how he had imagined it at all.

The realisation of this crashed down on him so hard and so quickly that he froze up entirely. The woman, not wanting to play helpless victim, took notice of this and seeing it as an opportunity to escape did what she must. She brought a knee up, the pain in her shoulder giving her a strength that only blind adrenaline could offer, knocking her already already off-balanced attacker to one side. It took all her willpower to not let out a secondary screech as the motion of the man falling ripped the blade from her shoulder, tearing the wound with a clumsy rip that left her vision with stars and the lace of her sleeve a rich red. 

But the woman fled all the same, and the man was simply left there in his failure, forced to realise just how much he hated the feeling of blood cooling against his skin. 

There were, it seemed, some fantasies that were better left to the realm of the imagination, but one thing did come of the whole sorry affair all the same. He was able to say with absolute certainty from that night on that no, he was not actually equipped for murdering anyone at all, and so the assumptions about him were proven incorrect, all at the minorly insignificant cost of a stranger’s capacity to properly use her arm or walk about unaccompanied for quite some time.