TWENTYONE

Hello World.

It’s been nearly a month since I’ve last spoken to you and I still have no information about Riley.  I’ve been searching nonstop all around the city for anything, even just the smallest clue.  Last week I did find something interesting.  Last Tuesday, so that would be the 30th of October, I went back to the apartment.  I know it seems like a really stupid move but the cops were long gone by then.  They stopped hanging around the place two weeks after I left.  I made sure to enter the building unseen anyway and when I entered the apartment things looked generally untouched.  A few things moved here and there and Dexter’s cage was gone.  No doubt he’d be at my parents’ house.  I went through the kitchen to grab some food.  Thankfully I didn’t have to spend too much of the money I’d brought on stupid junk food.  I hate that shit.  I went to my room next to grab some things for Justine.  She wasn’t really running low on anything but while I was there I figured I might as well grab some things for her.  I moved into Riley’s room after that.  I stood in the doorway looking at everything that was still there.  His bed unmade, his clothes strewn all over the floor, the bald spot in his room where Dexter’s cage once sat.  His bathroom door was open and I went in.  I immediately noticed there were speckles of reddish brown on the edges of the sink.  I moved closer to investigate.  The majority of the sink was clear except for those few little spots.  I touched one of the speckles and some of it rubbed off onto my finger.  This confused me.  There was no way this wouldn’t be completely dry after a month, and surely the police would have seen this and taken samples.  There was no indication that the police did so.  The blood was completely undisturbed until I touched it.  Someone had been in the apartment recently.  Could it have been Riley?  He was the only other one with a key except for the owners of the building.  I looked around a little more before leaving the bathroom and upon leaving Riley’s room I grabbed one of his shirts and stuffed it into my backpack.  I left the apartment carefully, making sure I was hardly noticed.  Later that night I was walking through the neighborhood where I killed that man.  I don’t know why I was there.  I suppose it’s just where I ended up.  Justine was running a few feet ahead of me; her collar’s bell was jingling every time she moved.  I started to hear a voice in the back of my head.  It was really quiet and I hadn’t noticed it at first but then I turned around to see if it was perhaps just someone behind me.  No one was around.  Soon the one voice turned into multiple, they grew louder only slightly when a new voice chimed in with the others.  I couldn’t understand any of them.  I hadn’t even noticed that I was going to run into someone until they angrily stomped around me. 

“Pay attention to where you’re walking!” The woman scolded. The voices stopped and so did I.  I turned around to look at her and managed to hear her curse at me before she crossed the street.  Suddenly I felt this….itch.  This pinch.  It was irritating and insistent.  I found myself turning towards her and I began to follow her.  I hardly noticed the jingle of Justine’s bell rapidly trying to catch up with me.  The bell was soon muted completely and cancelled out by a loud ringing in my ears.  It was really loud but it didn’t hurt.  The woman’s footsteps stopped and she turned to face me with an annoyed look that began to turn to nervousness.  I stopped a few yards in front of her and stared not at her, but past her.  Down the sidewalk a short way under a streetlight was the tall man.  His blank face was watching us.  It seemed like he was waiting for something…but what?  I looked back at the woman who was closer to me now and she looked shocked.  Her face was frozen and unchanging when she fell to her knees.  I stepped back slightly startled and let her fall to the ground.  She was shivering uncontrollably and her teeth chattered loudly.  I found it extremely annoying and bent down closer to her. Her eyes moved up to the side in order to look at me.  I reached into my pocket and pulled out my pocket knife.  I flipped out the blade and felt an extreme satisfaction from the look of sheer terror in the woman’s eyes.  I reached over and grabbed the sides of her jaw with my thumb and four fingers pressing in a specific position to force her mouth open.  I poked the blade into her mouth and carefully sliced into her gums, pulling the blade back towards the front.  Her eyes streamed with tears and her mouth filled with blood.  She never made a single sound.  She couldn’t, because He wouldn’t let her.  I moved the knife to the inside of her teeth and once again started at the back and sliced towards the front, deep enough to reach the bottom roots of each tooth.  I pulled the knife out and set it down in the grass, I reached in with my fingers and pulled out each of the teeth on the bottom left side of her mouth.  The ones closest to the front came out easily but I had to grab my knife again to pull out the ones in the back.  I repeated this whole process for the bottom right side of her mouth.  The blood was streaming out of her mouth like a waterfall, so once I was done pulling her teeth I turned her on her back so that her mouth would fill with the blood gushing from her gums.  Her throat gurgled through the blood as she struggled to breathe and I watched her suffocate until she finally stopped moving.  I grabbed her purse and opened it to shuffle through for her wallet.  The tall man was closer now but I didn’t react the way I had with the man.  I handed the wallet to him and he took it.  I bent down to grab my knife.  When I stood back up He and the woman were gone.  The only thing left was a small photo on the sidewalk.  I reached down to grab it and looked at it.

It was a photo of Carolyn and the woman I just killed.  At first I didn’t recognize Carolyn, but I recognized her young childish features and also the bruise-like birthmark on the left side of her cheek.  She was one of those people who kept their baby face into their adult years.  I then realized who the woman was.

The woman in the photo was Carolyn’s mother.

~Willow