But there was much to hold his interest today.
The dead men in the wrecked cabin. The ships offshore and the black helicopter that swept occasionally overhead. The sheer fact that there was nobody of consequential authority around for miles. He didn’t have to wear his mask so tightly. He could loosen the straps and let the things underneath twist their way into the light.
But mostly there was Kent Jenks—Johnny Football, Mr. Big Shot, the uncrowned king of North Point—locked up in the root cellar.
Oh my God, the fun they were going to have.
The last time Shelley could recall feeling this level of elation was the afternoon he’d killed Trixy, the kitten his mother adopted after finding her under their porch.
Shelley had been killing things for a while by then—although he didn’t think of it as killing, per se. Other creatures, even people, were empty vessels. Of course, not physically empty: all living things were packed full of guts and bones and blood that leapt giddily into the air when it was released from a vein. But none of them had an essential… well, essence. They were just ambulatory sacks of skin. That was really it. Shelley honestly felt no more remorse tearing another living thing apart than he would ripping the limbs off a wooden marionette.
He’d gotten started with bugs. He’d found these two big stag beetles entangled in a territorial battle in the crotch of the backyard maple. He’d gathered them up and, after some preparation, pulled most of their legs and antennae off—he used his mother’s tweezers for this delicate work, the same ones she plucked her eyebrows with—and put them in a matchbox. He was surprised and delighted to discover that beetles were cannibals: when he’d opened the box a few days later, he found one of them flipped helplessly on its back and the other one devouring its gooey insides.
He’d promptly filled the matchbox with his mother’s nail polish remover and lit it with a match. The beetles’ organs popped and crackled inside their black exoskeletons as they roasted.
He soon graduated to bigger, more impressive conquests. He caught deer mice in sticky traps and painted liquid Borax onto their eyeballs with a Q-tip—it was mesmerizing to watch their black eyes shrivel and sputter like fat in a fire.
Shelley found that animals adjusted to their physical diminishments much better than people. If you burned a man’s eyes out, he would shriek and bleat, of course, and he’d need a cane and a Seeing-Eye dog the rest of his moaning, miserable days. A mouse just stumbled around in pain for a few minutes, pawed at its cored-out eye sockets, squeaked and twitched its nose, and carried on with what it was doing before. Animals were incredibly flexible that way.
Shelley had gone to work on Trixy during an evening when his parents were off at a silent auction for their church. He was at the kitchen table eating a Creamsicle. Trixy twined round his socked feet, brushing against his calves.
“Hello, kitty-kitty.”
She hopped up on his lap. Her little claws pierced his sweatpants and dug lightly into his thighs. Shelley chewed on the Popsicle stick while petting the kitten. She arched her back to accept his soft strokes. Her fur was downy like the hair on a baby’s head. He could feel her small, thin bones beneath her coat.
He carried her upstairs. She was purring quite loudly—such big, satisfied noises from such a small thing. Her body was a power plant, kicking off a lot of heat. Shelley’s mother hadn’t had her spayed yet.
He went into the bathroom and locked the door. He put Trixy on the toilet lid, where she kneaded the macramé seat cover. His mom said this was a sign of separation anxiety—kittens would knead their mothers’ bellies to stimulate milk, so they could nurse. But kittens who’d been separated too early kneaded anything. Sweaters and sofa cushions and toilet seats—as if any of those had the ability to squirt milk. They were confused, according to Shelley’s mother. A real heartbreaker, she said. Shelley just nodded as if he felt the same way, too. He found that if you nodded—slowly, deeply, your chin almost touching your chest to indicate sincerity—people would think you shared their feelings. It was one of the many tricks he’d learned in order to blend in; hiding in plain sight was a beneficial skill.
Shelley plugged the bathtub drain and ran the water, glancing back to the toilet. Trixy was still there, purring. Good. As the tub filled, his hand crept under the elasticized hem of his sweats to toy absently with his privates. He wasn’t surprised to find that he was erect—a throbbing, urgent hardness that seemed to drain the blood out of his arms and legs and focus it all on his penis. He stood with his mouth unhinged, eyes alight with unspeakable excitement, an oily sweat breaking out over his long, milky body.
He opened the cabinet under the sink and donned the long plastic gloves draped over a canister of Ajax: his mother’s cleaning gloves. His fingertips went cold while the rest of him burnt with a steady eager heat.
He sat Trixy on the edge of the tub. The kitten stared up at him with round yellow-edged eyes as her paws slipped for purchase on the porcelain. Another thing about animals: they had no conception that the creatures who fed them might be the same ones who could do them such great harm.
Scout Law number eight: A Scout is a friend to animals…
Shelley grabbed Trixy by her scruff and plunged her into the water.
It was as if raw electrical current had been pumped into Trixy’s body: her limbs went rigid and scrabbled against the porcelain. She almost screwed out of his grip, but he grabbed her throat—his hand manacled easily around the furry drainpipe of her neck—and shoved her back down.
After twenty seconds, her struggles lessened. After about a minute, her struggles ceased. Shelley gave it another few seconds just to be certain.
He let go of her motionless body. A dry, dusty taste filled his mouth—it was like he’d swallowed a mouthful of the chalk they spread into white lines on a baseball diamond. But already the elation was subsiding. It was over so fast. The kitten had almost no fight in her at a—
Trixy shot straight up out of the water. She looked so damn scraggly with her fur soaked and matted to her skin. Shelley almost laughed. Trixy yowled and scrabbled up the sloped side of the bathtub. Shelley reached in and lovingly collected her four little legs into a bundle, clasping them all in one hand. She bit feebly at his gloves with her needle teeth. She let out a desperate reeeeeooowl and beheld him with tragically confused eyes.
He dunked her under the water. His face was expressionless, but the sweat had now soaked through his shirt. His penis was painfully hard and he felt the excruciating yet somehow pleasant need to urinate.
He pulled Trixy out of the tub. Her head lolled comically between her shoulder blades. He dunked her once more, absentmindedly, the way an old biddy dips her bag of Earl Grey in a teacup.
She may still be alive, he thought. He considered letting her live. That could be interesting. Shelley figured Trixy might act like Johnnie Ritson, who as a boy had swum out beyond the shore markers and nearly drowned. Now Timmy spent his days in an old rocker in front of the Hasty convenience store saying “Hi! Hi! Hi!” to everything: customers, random passersby, delivery trucks, pigeons, the clear blue sky. One time Shelley put a tack on Timmy’s rocker when he was using the toilet, waiting until nobody was watching. Timmy’s reaction amazed and amused him: he sat heavily, gulping from a can of Yoo-hoo, just rocking and rocking, blabbing “Hi! Hi! Hi!” He didn’t register it at all. Shelley had lingered, intrigued, and when Timmy got up he’d seen the brass head of the tack flush with Timmy’s wide, flat ass, the surrounding fabric dark with blood.