How I Fell In Love With A Serial Killer

Myles and I had been getting on well those last couple of months, no new girls had been brought into the corridor, and I could tell our relationship was blooming into something more than what it had been. This was probably due to my soft flirting. Warmer smiles when he came to talk, louder laughs when he tried to joke, and trailing touches when he gave me gifts. My cell had looked quite different from its original bare stone prison, blankets covered the small bed, a chair sat in the corner, and an old bookcase was slowly filling with second hand novels. He always seemed genuinely happy bringing me these treats, the flowers most of all. They would bring a flush to his face when he handed one through the barred window of the door. It was almost, sweet; and I found it warming my own cheeks as time went on.                     

He had this boy next door look, shy eyes and fluffed brown hair. His lips would always pull at one side when I made him smile, like he wasn’t used to doing it. It made me forget sometimes what he actually did down there, the girls, the torture. He told me once, quite fervently, that he never touched any of them. Not sexually, that wasn’t who he was. Just murder, just kidnapping, because we all have to find those little silver linings in life.                           

I think it was February when he first let me out. Months of being kept in that room, hearing the screams from down the corridor, and then all of a sudden his chest on my back as he guided me into his kill room.                                                                  

“I want you to watch!” His breath had been warm in my ear as I locked eyes with the girl  strapped to the flayed man’s cross in the centre of the room. Her eyes had screamed in horror at the gentleness he showed me.                                             

It wasn’t meant to happen, I wasn’t meant to actually feel anything, but somehow the paradox of pretending to care for someone who did such horrific things, and yet they never did them to you, made me actually fall for him a little. Of course nothing can erase what I saw that night, his first kill in front of me, the first body to hush after hours of mutilation. I’m surprised I never threw up, not once. But the scarring in my brain will never fade. The knowledge of what some men, no, boys, are capable of, even with the outside appearance of innocents, that has stayed with me even now.     

His death was like a gunshot wound that blew through my chest and out the other side, taking my heart with it. Perhaps my childhood too. We had been in his kill room, his hands on my face, our bodies warm from touching, and eighteen more defiled girls had passed since the first one I had been made to see. He had a gun in his waistband, he always had a gun, and when the SWAT team broke through the corridor and down it into his kill room, he used it on himself. He had kissed me fervently, bruising my lips for days to come, and shot a hole through his head before the police could even take target. To this day I still shy at the sight of red drops on white tiles.             

Therapy afterwards had felt like a prison sentence all on its own. Having to relive what I’d been through, what I’d seen, for one week after another, until my time down in the cellar with Myles almost felt like wallpaper lining my brain. As though it was all I was. Yet my therapist seemed to enjoy it, making me relive what had happened, a unique case study that he could pry his hands into. I wasn’t surprised, he worked in the Augusta Mental Hospital in Maine, working on the in-patients, murderers, psychopaths; and then me. My parents lived nearby, and I had stayed with them during those months. Session after session my therapist pried into my memories, pried into my relationship with Myles, just as his eyes pried along the curves of my body that had finally filled into womanhood. I hated him; and then he was dead.  

An explosion in the hospital, a gas leak, an open flame, and five dead patients with one on the loose. My therapist had been caught in this awful blaze, but I couldn’t say I was sorry. I was sorry for knowing the man who had done it though. The patient in the hall who had watched me visit for every session, had slowly made comments to me when I passed, had grabbed my hand and pushed me up against a wall when the nurse hadn’t been looking. I remember his breath against my throat, the scratching of his beard against my cheek, and it had made me miss the sweet boy who had always been so gentle to me, even while the blood he had caused flooded down the gutters in the basement floor.                    

An obsession can consume any person, but let an obsession consume a man who had been imprisoned in a mental hospital due to butchering his wife and kids with an axe, then you can only wish you weren’t at the eye of that fixation. My kidnapping had caught his eye in the paper next to my picture, the string of girls showing up dead had aroused his interest, and my survival at the end of it all had lulled him into a mania of need. He needed the girl who could survive a serial killer, and I did not need him.

The Axeman, as he was called, escaped in the explosion; and the words he had whispered in my ear the day he had pressed himself against me along the wall still rung in my ears. ‘You’re gonna be mine little survivor.’ And so I ran.                                       

 The court allowed my leave of therapy, and I left my life behind, left the imprisonment in the hallway behind, and found a small town to settle into. A place of blossom trees and coffee shops. Warm breezes and smiling faces. And most of all a small house at the edge of the woods where I could be safe.                          

The man who rebuilt my heart had roughened palms of hard work that I enjoyed to kiss. He kept stubble on his cheeks, and an easy smile on his face that didn’t coheres or intimidate. He asked permission before every touch, and with each gentle whisper I felt a warmth grow within me that had been doused before I had even been allowed to love. Gideon Blake met me with a bump in the street, and with that thud my heart re-started, lulling my empty shell back into life again. We fell swiftly and enjoyably in love. Nothing had ever felt so bright or warm. Nothing so easy and forgivingly safe. We got engaged too soon, and he moved in too late, and we found an easy pattern of life that shouldn’t have been allowed to the likes of us.                                                

Winter had only just started when he had come home late that one night. He didn’t see me waiting up alone in the shadows of the kitchen, the only warmth a mug in my hand when the front door had opened a quarter to midnight. I remember the night following him in. Rain drops littering the wooden floors, and the mass that he heaved to the basement sent the heat from my hands the moment I saw it.                                                               

It felt as though it were happening again. A basement, a cell, bodies being dragged along the floor; and death stifling the air with its languid fingers. But I wasn’t nineteen anymore, I was a woman, a woman who had just married a man who had put that in our basement.                           

I shouldn’t have stayed, I shouldn’t have waited for him to go up to bed, but I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. I didn’t want it to be true again. So I went down, went to the room that looked like betrayal the moment I saw it. I had barely looked at the body-bag longer than a few moments before I heard him at the top of the stairs above me.                               

“Love?” His voice had sounded gentle, curious, while the dim light from the hall darkened his face to me. He must have seen the tremor in my skin as the ghost of a girl I'd thought I’d had to shed years ago stood beside me, looking to another man I was going to have to survive. Gideon Blake had yet to surprise me in our marriage, and that night was the start of many more to come. He came to my side, and he shut the door to death, and with hovering hands he asked my permission to touch. Just as he always had; and so, I let him hold me. Not because he wanted me to, but because I needed to be held, and I needed the man I thought I had married to do so. I needed his sweet eyes and tender frame, I needed the warmth of a friend, a confidants understanding. He held me as though it were not him who had brought the body in. As though he had not chosen to go out that night, as he had previously done for many nights, and hunt down a person to kill. He let me kiss him with tears staining my cheeks, and I let him murmur soft appeals in my ear. We curled away from that night like a cold breath at the edge sleep. We talked, he apologised, and I forgave myself for falling in love with a man like the one who had stolen me so many years ago.                                                                              

But I don’t believe I fully forgave him for his hobbies until the night of the break in. A past ordeal I had hoped was long forgot came back to find me one flickering night. A man with a beard on his jaw and an axe in hand came in to our home, came looking for his survivor. Gideon and I had been in bed, a shared warmth surrounding us like hidden secrets, and a noise had broken that sleep like a hidden deceit. What ensued after was not a brawl between two soldiers, nor the attempts of a husband trying to defend his home, but a blow for blow duel between one killer to another. Skill and strength powered both of them, one used unkept rage and a manic compulsion, while the love of my life, my husband, used a controlled bloodlust that he had shaped and moulded from years of killing in the dark alleyways of the night. Gideon hadn’t needed the lights to be on, he knew the shape of our home like his own playground, and the clear rationality of his mind came through while catching the Axeman into an air halting neck hold. I had stood watching from the hallway, the shadows covering me like the blankets I had just been under, and I watched as the muscles strained from husbands biceps, the sweat quickening off his brow, and how the maniac had more rage in his eyes than the Fury of Anger, Alecto herself.                                

The blood that had covered our wooden floored home had made me shy from it for days; and the feeling of cutting into anything sickens my stomach to its pit even now. But my husbands hands on mine now help with the cooking; and Gideon's roughened palms on my lips still make me recall how he tore up those wooden floors and replaced them with carpets after that ordeal. And the love of my life, my serial killer, I will never forget the look he gave to me that night, when I readied the axe in my hand, and chose love over the innocents of slaughter.  

Blood had soaked my skin from the moment I was stolen aged nineteen, and I fulfilled that curse the night I took my first life, with my husband’s eyes looking on me in wonder. He had held that man still and tight as I laid low blow for blow every swing that had befallen every girl I had seen slaughtered in that basement so long ago.                        

And with warm summer days, and blanket wrapped winter nights, we survived.