Prey

Trigger warning: Sexual violence, mental health, physical violence, gore, abusive language, suicide, murder.



My face was lit up by the screen of the telephone. I quickly found the app and switched off the alarm to the house. How silly, to have a security system that is controlled by phone. It’s even more silly to install electronic locks that you can open with – again – your phone. I closed the door behind me as softly as I could. I’d seen the floor plan of the house, and I knew where to go, but I also knew she’d had a panic room installed, so I would have to go quietly. I didn’t want to wake her up yet. When I reached her bedroom, I took a screwdriver from my pocket and dismantled the panic button, just in case. Then I spent a few minutes looking at her sleeping. So beautiful. So angelic. Such a slut.

***

I was working as a barman at the Black Horse pub when I first saw her. She was so young and pretty. Susan, the friend that she’d come with, had had her eyes on a guy who was a regular, and who seemed to reciprocate the attraction. As a result, Deirdre spent most of the evening at the bar, talking to me. I didn’t mind, it wasn’t very busy that night.

                 ‘I guess you’ve been abandoned,’ I said while I was filling her wineglass. She looked over at her friend, who was ferociously flirting.

                 ‘Yeah, it seems that way,’ she sighed. ‘This isn’t how I’d imagined this evening.’ I smiled wryly and gave her the glass.

                 ‘I’m Raymond, by the way.’

                 ‘Deirdre. Tell me, Raymond, do you see this often? Sad girls ditched by their friends after having been dragged out because that so-called friend requires backup?’

                 ‘Careful, you’re starting to sound very bitter there. Besides, you could have your own share of admirers if you wanted to.’ I walked away to serve another customer. When I came back she seemed bashful.

                 ‘Do you mean that?’ She said, ‘That I could have my share of admirers?’ She sounded quite hopeful.

                 ‘Absolutely. Why, is that something you’d like? Adoration from the masses?’

                 ‘Oh, Raymond, you have no idea. I do cosplay make-up tutorials on TikTok. I’ve been a content creator for so long, but I don’t feel I’m getting anywhere. I wish I were famous…’ I laughed and tried to cheer her up.

                 ‘I have no doubt that you will be, but you should be careful what you wish for. You might get stalkers. And you’ll forget all about me.’ I topped up her glass.

                 ‘No way. You know what, I’ll take a photo of us both so I’ll have you on my phone and I can’t lose you.’ She whipped out her mobile, a glittery pink thing, and swiped a heart figure to unlock it. She took a series of selfies of the two of us. ‘There,’ she said, ‘I’ve labeled them: Raymond at the Black Horse.’ She put the phone down on the bar, picked up her glass and drained it. I poured her a new one. ‘But how will you remember me?’ She pouted. The alcohol was clearly getting to her.

                 ‘Well,’ I said,’if you’re going to be famous, I guess I would want your autograph.’

                 ‘Y-You got it, buddy!’ She slurred. I handed her a pen and a napkin.

                 ‘You’re the best. Love forever, Deirdre Macintosh’ she wrote with a flourish, knocking over her wineglass in the process. She shoved her phone aside to make sure it didn’t get wet.

                 ‘Oops, sorry.’ She straightened the glass. I hid my amused smile by mopping up the spill and pouring her another drink. Then I carefully tucked the napkin in my pocket.

                 ‘LET GO OF ME, YOU BASTARD!’ Susan’s voice rang out, followed by a loud slap. She came stalking over to us. ‘Why are men all such shits?’ She demanded angrily. ‘I’m done with that idiot. Let’s go home.’ She grabbed Deirdre by the arm and practically dragged her out of the pub. I tried to protest, saying that they hadn’t paid their bill, but the two girls were gone before I could get the words out. Then, my eye fell on an object on the bar: Deirdre’s phone.

                 ‘Well, I thought, she’ll be back for that soon enough,’ I thought, and put the device in my pocket.

Cloning the sim turned out to be child’s play, and by the time Deirdre walked back into the pub the next evening, searching for her phone, I had a complete back-up of all her details, her contacts, her apps and even the file that held all her passwords. With a bit of tinkering, I had placed two hidden apps on her phone: one that permanently tracked her location, and one that recorded all her activities onto my computer. I’d also managed to ensure that any emails, notifications and direct messages would come to my spare phone as well as hers. It was obvious that she lived her life on her phone. And I now had that life in my hands. It got even better a few weeks later, when she bought herself a fancy smartwatch. She wore it everywhere. I knew when she slept, when and what she ate, when and how she worked out, who and where she met people. And I was everywhere with her.

I didn’t do much in the beginning, I just kept an eye on her calendar and her location, so that I could ‘accidentally’ run into her. Soon it became clear that she didn’t remember much of her evening at the Black Horse. She certainly never acknowledged me, the stuck-up bitch. But I didn’t start thinking of ways to… manipulate… things a little until Brian came into the picture.

She was well known by then, with over 250,000 followers on TikTok. Brian had been an admirer for at least as long as I had. He always wrote flattering comments on her posts, although he used an alias that wasn’t gender specific. If he had, I would have put a stop to him long ago. They met at a Comic-con event, where she had been invited to do a live make-up workshop. I wasn’t there, so I’m not certain how they got together exactly, but boy, did I know about their attraction. Right from that first day, Deirdre’s WhatsApp blew up with messages from him and to him. It was obvious, even to me, that she was head over heels for that dick. It made my blood boil. But the final straw was that one message:

‘Oh, that pic you saw last night? That was nothing. Just the bartender in a pub I was at a while ago. He’s not important.’

Not. Important. Indeed.

I started quite innocently by delaying and sometimes deleting his messages, and by writing snarky texts back to his declarations of love. Both of their messages became more and more desperate and I revelled in their confusion. Lover boy didn’t last very long after I got involved, the wimp. But even after he gave up and blocked her, I didn’t stop interfering in her life; no way was I going to let her disrespect me like that again. I changed the occasional important appointment in her calendar to a different time, or a different place. I blocked him, and other fans from her TikTok account and started posting on her behalf. I love AI. Making deep fake videos turned out to be easy. Soon she started to lose most of her followers, which I then replaced by bots (which I bought for her, at considerable cost, I might add) and with, shall we say, the nastier sort of fan. She became a poster girl for both the alt-right and the aggressive anarchists of the world. Her socials became swamped with vileness. I managed to track down a photo of her in bikini, and photoshopped it into a filthy porn picture. It went viral and was seen by millions.

I got under her skin, and she didn’t even know it was me. For a long time, she’d kept a diary on her phone, and I read it often. The tone was becoming sad, mad and paranoid. When she wrote that she was thinking about contacting a psychologist, I made sure all her emails were intercepted by me before being sent on; she never knew that the angry rejection she received from the psychologist actually came from me.

Finally, I started leaving messages for her; a text, sent from her own number, that she was going to die soon. The phone number for her mother replaced by a voicemail in an unrecognizable voice, saying that it wouldn’t be long now. Her last diary entry replaced by a single message: ‘The End’.

I was amazed that she hadn’t figured out that it was her phone that allowed me to do all of those things. When she became desperate, I listened in on her call with an expensive security company, who explained what their ideas were to ensure her safety. I’d seen her reports to the police, who told her that they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do anything. I intercepted the frantic pleas for help to her friends and family and replaced them with messages that showed the real Deirdre: a shallow, arrogant liar, who led people on and who did anything for fame. She had given me her love forever. I wasn’t going to let her take that back. She was mine. And I wanted her to myself.

Things came to a head when she suddenly disappeared. She stopped using her phone and her smartwatch. She didn’t post anything to her socials, didn’t email or text anyone, didn’t write in her journal. For a while I thought she might have killed herself, and even planned to go see her, just in case. But then, going through her bank details, I noticed that she had withdrawn a large sum of cash from an ATM in a town over three hundred miles away. I checked her contacts: no one in the area. Then I checked her socials: nothing. I almost thought she’d outsmarted me, and had escaped, but then I thought of something. I went to her Facebook and looked at all her old photos. A few months earlier, she had scanned and uploaded a whole series of photos from her high school graduation, and I remembered there was one where she was celebrating, dressed in cap and gown, with a girl who, according to the caption, wasn’t on any social platform. But it did give her name. Esther Alten. Next, I went to the Facebook page of Deirdre’s friend Susan. It took me a long time searching – damn, those whores really do rack up a lot of nonsense on their socials – but I finally found photos of Susan’s visit Esther from nearly three years earlier. The pics were touristy, and they were of the same town where Deirdre had made her withdrawal. The internet search took me only minutes to find the exact address after that and had access to my Deirdre again. She didn’t think she could leave me behind that easily, did she?

Esther was very quickly spooked by the packages and letters that started arriving at her home and place of work. Within a week, my phone dinged: I received a message that the security system at Deirdre’s house had been switched off: my baby had come home. I smiled and started making my plans. She would never leave me again.

***

I watched the slow rising and falling of her chest for a while before gently setting down my bag and taking out the rope and duct tape that I’d bought on her credit card. I savored this moment. Soon, she’d be mine, and she was never going to belong to anyone else. I set the knife on her nightstand and undressed myself. I was already hard in anticipation. I gently moved the quilt from her perfect little figure. She woke up when I put my hand over her mouth, holding her body down with mine. Not that it would matter if she screamed, there was no one in the house and it was well insulated, but I was afraid the sound would turn me off. I shouldn’t have worried. The tears streamed down her face when I tied her hands to the headboard.

                 ‘Shhh, my angel, don’t cry. It’ll be over soon.’ I stroked her hair: it was silky and soft under my fingers. ‘Now be a good girl and spread your legs for me.’ She fought and managed to kick me in the shin. I slammed my fist in her face. ‘You bitch. You asked for this. I’m just giving you what you deserve, you little whore!’ I pushed myself inside of her. She screamed through the duct tape, but I know they were screams of joy. I pushed harder and harder, quickly reaching my climax. I’d been fantasizing about this for so long. And she was getting aroused, I could tell. The knowledge made me come even harder, pulsating deep inside of her. I gently wiped the tears of ecstasy from her face.

                 ‘Don’t worry, it’s over now. Tomorrow you will be famous, just like you wished.’ I picked up the knife from the bedside table and held it against her perfect throat. ‘You’ll see.’ I slashed. I felt myself growing hard again as the light left her eyes and her body went limp. I entered her once more, before moving the knife to my own throat.