Meet-A-Murderer

The room had a strange frozen quality to it.

What the room held did not readily explain it. There was a desk and two chairs, and three bookshelves that rose high and disappeared into gloom. A fabulously diverse array of books filled the shelves; but their colours seemed faded, like they were replicas made from a vintage photograph. Perhaps that was it. Or perhaps it was the fact that through the half-hearted bars of light that criss-crossed the greys of the room, particles of dust seemed to hang still, as if suspended in place by an invisible hand. Or perhaps it was the fact that the pile of papers on the desk lay preternaturally still, and not the slightest breeze stirred the air.

It was as if the room was a snapshot, paused in time.

The illusion was only partially broken when the door creaked open and a man walked in. He was of the sort you would uncharitably call average; he was not too tall, not too fat, not too handsome. His mannerisms were of a man used to being inconspicuous. An easy and understated gait, not so stiff and upright as to draw admiration, not so slouched and sneaky as to draw suspicion, brought him to the chair in front of the desk. Even his breathing seemed to be tuned to the height of docility, a gentle, barely visible rise and fall. A pair of spectacles lay perched on his nose. His hair was neatly and carefully parted to one side and set with water.

The man seemed confused. He alternated between eagle-eyed restlessness and glassy-eyed languor. He slumped in the chair hopelessly, but only for a brief while. Then he got up and paced between the two bookshelves that lay perpendicular to the desk. Sepia beams of light carved patterns across his clothes as he moved. He sat down again; and then he stood up again. Walking over to one of the bookshelves he made as if to pick up one of the colourless tomes, but before he did so, his eyes glazed over as if he had forgotten what he had set out to do, and he went back to slump in the chair.

Something seemed to strike him while sitting in the chair; his body quieted its restless stirrings. The trembling foot stilled; the tapping fingers froze and he didn’t blink. He seemed to be mumbling something.

“Wasn’t there a cat?”

But the respite was only temporary, as the fidgeting renewed once more. He stood, he paced, he slumped, he straightened, he scanned the bookshelves, and repeated everything ad nauseum until the man and his clockwork tics were one with the timeless quality of the room.

An unknown period of time passed.

The door once more creaked open, and another man walked in. Perhaps it was the contrast with the man already in the room that accentuated it, but this was a man who oozed masculinity. Broad shoulders and barrel chest strained against the seams of his sharp business suit. Angular features were brought into severe relief by the uneven lighting in the room. He was tall, his hair was fashionably clipped yet roguishly long, and he smelled like musk. His eyes though were gentle, and he face stretched into a beatific smile when the first man turned around to take in the second.

“Welcome!”, said the second man as he walked towards the other chair, with brisk, powerful strides.
The first man didn’t react. If the second man’s appearance had startled him, his cheerful greeting seemed to have struck him senseless.

The second man continued smiling for so long that it began to look strained. The first man continued to look bewildered.

“How do you feel today?”, the second man murmured gently.

“I.. I don’t seem to remember how I got here.” the first man stuttered as if surprised to discover he had a voice. The sentence rose and fell in sync with the man’s wavering confusion.

“That’s perfectly normal. Most of our patients tend to feel disconcerted in the initial stages of the treatment.” The second man paused, leaned forward and asked. “You do remember I’m your Doctor right?”

A faint glimmer of recognition lit the Patient’s eyes but disappeared just as quick.

“Doctor… Patient.. “ the Patient murmured incoherently.

The Doctor said nothing. His whole demeanour seemed to ooze consideration and patience.

Images flashed in the Patient’s head. No. Calling them images suggested a solidity that the apparitions lacked. They were like smoky sensations that flitted in and out, now solidifying into near images, but then fading into fantastic impossibilities. Death. Despite their apparent randomness, an undercurrent could be discerned at a level beyond reasoning. Death. They were tinged with death. Death – and illness. He had been critically ill. (Had been?) Death. Illness.

“How did I get here?”, the Patient repeated.

“Never mind that. We’re here for the treatment now and that’s all that matters.” The Doctor’s voice modulated itself into tones that demanded trust, while his face was authority itself.

The Doctor paused for a moment, and as if satisfied with his patient’s response, pulled out a sachet from his breast pocket. Something buzzed and moved inside. An insect? The Doctor meticulously bored a tiny hole in one corner of the sealed packet, placed it in front of him on the desk, and waited. The buzzing and hovering intensified for a moment, before it stopped altogether. The antenna of an insect poked through tentatively, followed by bulbous compound eyes. The Doctor sat like a benevolent statue in the background.

The insect pushed and prodded through the too-small hole. It buzzed and whined into higher and higher frequencies, until finally it was through. In a flash, the Doctor came to life, and almost quicker than the eye could see, he had grabbed the insect and held it between his thumb and forefinger. He jutted his hand out as if to show his kill to the Patient who watched in horrified fascination but said nothing.

The little insect struggled every which way, but the Doctor’s grip was secure. He did nothing for what seemed like minutes, but in a startling burst of action, ripped out one of the insect’s four wings. The whining and buzzing seemed to reach a crescendo. The Doctor smiled and looked up at the Patient again. Then the second wing was plucked out, with surgical delicacy, and placed gently on the desk alongside the first. Then the third, and then the fourth, and the helpless insect was placed on its back gently on the desk. Its buzzing was stilled but a faint, rasping sound remained. The Doctor wasn’t done yet. He picked up an upturned glass and placed it over the stricken bug.

Until this point it was as if the Patient was shocked into inaction by the sudden violence but now, he pushed back his chair as if to get up and stop the madman. Suddenly, the Doctor’s eyes jerked towards him and stopped him dead in his tracks. There was an unspeakable malevolence in them that sent chills down the Patient’s spine. The Patient sat back down and looked away, but he could feel the Doctor’s eyes boring holes into him, so eventually looked back up. The angelic smile was back in place. Was he mistaken? The neatly arranged insect wings and the slowly suffocating insect still lay there on the desk. Both the Doctor and the Patient continued watching the thrashing insect.

An unknown period of time passed.

“The treatment is going well.” The Doctor murmured.

“Don’t you feel better? At this rate, you’ll be cured in no time at all.”

The Patient just looked at him. His thoughts were an incoherent jumble, and any attempt at organizing them into a semblance of meaning was constantly interrupted by those flashes of dark somethings in his mind.

The Doctor pulled out a suitcase from under the desk. He opened it slowly, all the while not taking his eyes off the Patient. From inside the suitcase, he extracted a bird’s cage, with a bird in it. It was a blue-gold robin, a beautiful, elegant bird that only seemed to shine bright for a moment, before the room sucked its colourful soul away. Its cheeping quietened almost immediately. Despite himself, the Patient leaned forward in gruesome anticipation.

Never for a moment taking his eyes off the Patient, the Doctor gently picked up the robin. As if it show how much the bird trusted him, he loosened his grip. The bird tentatively began to flap a wing but stayed where it was. In the blink of an eye, the Doctor wrung its neck and tossed it on the desk. His eyes burned with black fire challenging the Patient to do something, to say something, to even move a muscle. The Patient sat where he was, pinned by the force of that baleful gaze. He felt tears stream down his cheeks. He made no move to wipe them away.

The Doctor walked into the room and sat down at the desk. No, he was always there. The Patient blinked at him. The Doctor smiled at him kindly.

“You’re almost there. You must feel like a million bucks already, but it’ll get better once you’re fully cured.”

“Are you ready?”

The Doctor didn’t wait for an answer and snapped a largish suitcase that he’d lugged onto the desk open. Carefully picking up something from inside with one hand, he slapped the case shut with the other and tossed it away into an invisible corner with easy strength. He held a tiny, grey cat in his hand.

The cat mewled gently. The Doctor reached out to scratch the cat behind its neck, and it purred. He smiled.

The Patient stared in helpless discomfort and began to shiver. The Doctor noticed this, but only paused to nod, as if telling the other man with the slight glance that it was almost. When he pulled out a ball of twine from a suit pocket, the little cat looked up in delight, wondering if it was playtime. Like a bolt of lightning in a cloudless sky, the movement was sudden and violent, and the twine was around the cat’s neck. The Doctor squeezed and squeezed.

The Patient leapt up off the chair. Just when he was about to reach the Doctor’s side of the desk, the Doctor stopped strangling the helpless little cat and sat back in his chair. He straightened his tie and pushed back hair that had tumbled down over his forehead. Rubbing his palm over the sheen of sweat that had covered his face, he gathered it at the tip of his forefinger and flicked it into a handkerchief. Sitting back easily in the throne-like chair, he looked steadily at the Patient’s outstretched hand and said nothing.

To his utter puzzlement, the Patient found that he was holding a large carving knife, and it was pointed at the Doctor. He dropped it and it clattered away into the gloom. Shaken, he sat back in his chair.

Something about the Doctor seemed different. He seemed as handsome and imposing as ever, but there was something broken about him. Were his eyes moist? Despite himself, the Patient said:

“Are you OK?”

The Doctor said nothing but looked away and continued to gaze steadily off into the distance.

“It is well known that cruelty to animals is the first sign of… becoming a psychopath,” the Patient said. The other man didn’t react, but the Patient seemed to blanch at his own words. “I’m… not calling you one. Even if I were calling you one, I wouldn’t be using that as an insult to put you down. I never would. I consider it as a form of mental illness that you can do little about. It can be triggered due to traumatic experiences in your childhood.”

The Doctor continued to look away.

“Was it your parents? It’s alright. I understand if you don’t want to talk about it. I don’t blame them either if they abused you; they might have had problems of their own. Maybe financial. Maybe they weren’t compatible. Maybe they were guilt-ridden because they couldn’t give each other and you the life or love you deserved. I say these things to humanize them.” The Patient’s voice grew more and more assured and seemed to ring even off the deadened walls in the room.

“It’s easy to dehumanize people, but humanizing? That’s much harder. And I point out these causes for their actions because these are things that affect everyone, even the saints.”

“And this applies to you as well. I know you think there’s something wrong with you. And maybe there is, but that doesn’t make you inhuman.”

“I empathize.”

With those two words, a thunderclap boomed in the Patient’s mind. Images, solid, aftershadows no more, flooded into his brain. Memories. They were memories. Were they? They almost seemed too real. But they were though, and he perceived this with axiomatic conviction.

He hadn’t been ill after all. Murder. It had been murder. The image of a handsome man, slightly out of focus, except for his mouth that spread in a rictus of animal pleasure. That man had been in his house. And that man had killed him. Smiling. Pain, searing, burning, intense pain in his neck. He had been choked to death.

Suddenly his eyes snapped back into focus, and he was back in the room. The Doctor was now looking at him. There was something familiar about the half-smile on his face. It seemed outwardly friendly, but it gleamed metal. There was no trace of the trembling self-pity that had seemed possess him only a moment ago.

“You never learn, do you?” Tightly coiled anticipation, but with the unmistakable tinge of sadness, suffused his voice. The Doctor looked at the knife in the Patient’s hand. “One act. Justice, wouldn’t it be? And your forever journey can continue.” The Doctor locked eyes with the Patient. “But you won’t.”

In a fraction of a second, the Doctor had got up off his chair, spanned the distance between their chairs and hovered over him like a shadow of evil, cutting off all light. The twine was around his neck, squeezing. Squeezing. A burning sensation began at his neck and seemed to sink into his lungs as he began to choke. At the same time, the memory of another burning, grew in lockstep with the pain of now. His mind knew what was going to happen, and even though the Doctor now stood behind him, he could see his face clearly as if it were in front of him. The fashionably longish hair that tumbled over his forehead, the teeth gritted and bared as if in the throes of unbearable passion, the sounds of gasping and moaning filled his mind. A red mist began to eat away at his field of vision with implacable voracity, until all he could see was a tiny circle of light, like the infinitely deep but narrow tunnel of a telescope’s lens. In that circle of light, a cat lay, looking at him expressionlessly and mewling.

In that room of timeless stillness, a room creaked open. A man walked in. He was of the sort you would uncharitably call average; he was not too tall, not too fat, not too handsome. His mannerisms were of a man used to being inconspicuous.

Credit: H. Talichi

Instagram