Firetale

  Chapter 3: Death

  “You’re the cutest girl I’ve ever seen in my life

  Now, louder now and with my knife.”

  Husker Du, “Diane”

  Mr. Berry was angry and confused. That uncouth punk of a magician had brought too much attention to him. Mr. Berry did not like to be in the spotlight, and the magician’s shenanigans had infringed on his first rule—keeping his head down. His safety depended on strictly abiding by the rules, and he did his best not to step out of line. He would have to stay in town for a couple of months more, another rule. He had been at it for fourteen years, and his current town was his twentieth. He had been Mr. Lock, Mr. White, Mr. Stamp, Mr. Glass, Mr. Bone, and fourteen other misters. Moving frequently was necessitated by his other main rule: one city, one killing. He never killed immediately upon arrival and did not leave a city immediately after the murder.

  He knew that people in small towns were too concerned about strangers, so he needed to make himself familiar. It could take a month or two, maybe half a year. The people must become accustomed to him, stop talking about him as a newcomer. And no matter how desirable it was to escape from a city right after the kiss-off, he had to pull himself together and sit tight. Otherwise, it would be too suspicious, and suspicion causes excessive scrutiny. During the months of waiting, he could plan and prepare. Only an idiot kills spontaneously, succumbing to lust.

  This implied two more rules: be patient and prepare in advance.

  Sometimes Mr. Berry watched a movie on TV. Now and then, movies about serial killers and maniacs came up. Mr. Berry never drew a parallel between himself and the villains of these films. Filmmakers had always been interested in killers who challenged society. Movie maniacs were too sociable, teasing detectives and tossing them puzzles pointing to the next murder. They behaved like men who dreamed of recognition. Such killers Berry did not understand. He tried not to leave any trace, avoiding police, and he did not care about society.

  Mr. Berry was quite satisfied that nobody had taken notice of him. He might have been just another loser whose career and personal life had not worked. To avoid being considered a weirdo, Mr. Berry sometimes told people about his imaginary family, offering as proof a photograph of a woman with two children that he had stolen from a frame in a supermarket a dozen towns ago. Sometimes he said the family had died in a car accident and he left his hometown because he could no longer live in a house once filled with his children’s laughter. Sometimes he liked to add a little drama, claiming that his wife learned he had cancer, divorced him, and put him out of the house to avoid paying the bills for his treatment. Then his listeners’ eyes filled with tears, and they muttered words filled with righteous anger. Mr. Berry was always amazed that people so easily believed such nonsense.

  Mr. Berry was lucky with his professorial face. People looked into his big sad eyes behind the glasses and believed his every word. Outside of work, he tried to be clean and tidy, and he avoided controversy and arguments.

  Until the age of thirty-two, Mr. Berry’s life had been as in a fog. He worked as a manager, selling used cars. He even had a girlfriend. But Mr. Berry’s head was always muddled, and he could not concentrate on his work nor on his romantic relationship. He was a mediocre employee and a boring boyfriend.

  And then he killed a hooker. It happened four months after Mr. Berry had been dumped by his girlfriend, who had found a more interesting man. It was the first and last time Berry paid for sex. It made him confused. He was overwhelmed with doubt and shame. The prostitute started to taunt him because of his meager manhood. Berry was a timid man, but he could not tolerate such insults. The fact that the woman was drunk was even more offensive. The murder occurred by chance. He shoved her, and she fell, hitting her neck on the edge of the bathtub. To his surprise, Berry was not afraid. He was excited, and the fog in his mind had cleared. Ever since then, he’d had a goal.

  He never again paid attention to whores. Their filth, their lust, their flabby thighs and painted faces disgusted him. He realized what he was once afraid to admit. Sex with older women did not clear the fog in his head, but only made ​​it less thick. They had too much rot, too many lies, too much hatred. Children, on the other hand, were innocent and trusting. Their skin was clean, and their scars healed with incredible speed.

  Berry had to leave the big city. In big cities, everybody was much too concerned about children’s safety. The schedules of some children looked like those of top managers in big corporations. If a child was an hour late from school, parents would call the police and every friend and relative in town. The bigger the city, the more dangerous for a child, they claimed.

  In small towns, everything was easier. Children knew who and what they needed to keep away from. Who could harm a kid in a town where everyone knew each other? Police in small towns dealt with domestic quarrels, shooed teenagers holed up in their father’s car at the roadside, and booted out long hitters from bars. When a child was lost, they interviewed the parents, friends, and teachers and checked the lakes, rivers, and forests. Mr. Berry was unconcerned. By the time the fruitless, wasteful search was over and panic had begun to spread, Mr. Berry would have hidden all the evidence.

  In this town, Mr. Berry noticed too late the girl in the white dress with red polka dots. By the time he saw her among the other children walking with their parents to a traveling circus, he had already chained another girl to the floor in the basement of his house. Her name was Julia. He had stalked her for more than two months. He had watched, learning her daily routine so that he could calculate when she would be alone and not at home. He wrote nothing down, lest documents incriminate him if something went wrong. Now that his life had a meaning, his brain worked much better, and it was easy to memorize all the necessary details. On Fridays, Julia left school before her girlfriends. Mr. Berry kidnapped her when she went to pee in the bushes on the way home.

  Still, the girl in the polka dress was so pretty that Mr. Berry had followed her to the circus to enjoy watching her a little more. But he reproached himself for it. He was late for the show because he hadn’t bought tickets in advance, and he couldn’t see the girl in the polka dress from his seat.

  He didn’t watch the show until the appearance of the trapeze artist. He remembered her name—Martha. He had long been indifferent to women, but this one caught his attention. He thought about her pure childlike skin, her innocent eyes. No, Mr. Berry did not feel the excitement. Looking at the gymnast he felt shame, and for a moment it seemed that someone in the audience would look at him and recognize him as a maniac. He wanted to stand up and confess right there, under the big top, to all the terrible deeds he had done. Later, when he thought about it at home, shivers ran down his spine. He forced himself to calm down. He knew how to get rid of the anxiety. No, he was not going to do anything to the girl in the dotted dress and patent leather shoes, he would not break his “one city, one killing” rule. He just wanted to dream a little. Though he would not be with her, he could turn his dreams into reality with Julia.