Page 14 of The Blood we Crave

Minus the brutal soreness, I enjoyed playing with the blood on my fingers. It made slipping across the keys more fluid. It felt right.

When I return my focus, I notice the next few parts don’tfeelright. I look up at the sheet music displayed on the music rack, furrowing my eyebrows. Completely stopping, I remove the pencil from behind my ear and erase a few notes.

I look at the now blank lines and wiggle my fingers on the keys, asking myself, what did the music in my mind sound like when I’d taken Walter from just outside that bar?

The night had been warm on my skin, and I could smell the pungent odor of cigarettes wafting from the inside of the cheap bar. My heartbeat had been steady as I watched him exit from the back door, his black suit wrinkled from the day’s wear and the cheap material it was made from.

I can spot a shoddy suit from a mile away, but I bet the people he surrounds himself with inside that shady bar thinks it’s expensive. The thought makes me scoff.

West Trinity Falls wouldn’t know a designer suit if it grew arms and smacked them in the face. God, just thinking of being in that town makes me feel dirty.

I don’t always wait in the shadows when I do this. Sometimes, I’ll walk inside wherever my target of the night is, and I’ll take a seat. Maybe at a table while observing them silently, or when I’m in the mood for it, I’ll talk them right into my web.

However, this time, I had waited in the dark, in the gloom of that vile alley, waiting for the perfect moment. I want the music floating from the instrument to translate that. I want it to tell the story without words, a slow, lyrical movement that contrasts the first form I’d created days earlier, a piece that allows me to show the beauty of my playing.

This form,Caccia, is the hunt. It needs to translate into a predator stalking its prey. An unknowing victim simply walks to their car with no sense of danger. The notes, in the beginning, start off slow, a gentle incline, and now I need it to be heavier.

I want the keys to sing the memory of my leather-gloved hand wrapping around him. I need to hear in the notes how he struggled against me just before I pierced his skin with the needle. How his body fell weak to the drug and slugged into my arms. How easy it had been to snatch him up, how good it felt to be this talented at what I do.

I want to feel it.

I want to relive those moments every single time I select Walter’s concerto from my collection. I’d let the fluid sounds bring me back to those moments so I could experience his torture all over again. I need to feel it slither through my corrupt veins.

Until I get it right, I will not move from this bench. I demand nothing short of perfection from myself. Frustration bites at me.

“Your father would already be done by now.”

Some voice that I despise speaks from inside of me, and I tighten my fist around the pencil, feeling the weak material bend in my grasp. My father, I want to say, could never do something this impressive. He killed women cause he felt like it, took the slivers of their hair as tokens, and had no creative vision.

He was beneath me. A nobody in comparison to me.

I am an artist.

Everything he wished he could be but never had the skill to achieve.

I hear a grumble of despair, and it’s enough to reel my back in from where my mind had traveled. Henry Pierson was the last thing I wanted to think about when I was in my basement.

Taking a much-needed deep breath, I inhale the smell of lye. The faint metallic smell soothes me. The boiling vat of liquid is tucked neatly in the corner near the bathroom, a conscious decision I’d made for easier cleanup. If I can’t get this combination correct, I won’t be able to move on to the final form, and that can’t happen.

I refuse to leave a piece unfinished.

Not again.

Never again.

One incomplete work was enough. I had no desire to add any more.

I work in silence for several more seconds, neatly writing down the new notes I think will fit better and begin playing from the beginning. I cascade through the bridge, a slow grin forming on my lips as I near the end of the song.

It’s a spectrum of somber noise, round, dark, and rich. Earlier, it had been flat, but now, it’s exactly where I need it to be. A living, breathing, wicked memory that I created.

Walter’s murmurs of misery and confusion blend with the last few notes of the song. A chill rolls up the column of my spine, and suddenly, I’m starving. The air becomes steady, and the room falls into a deep silence.

I feel the thing inside of me crawl out from its cave, rancid and baring its teeth, ready to feast on the body I’ve secured for it. When the piano stops, when my fingers quit moving eloquently over the keys, that is when the show stops.

I no longer need to pretend that I am anything but this. I’m finally in harmony with myself and what I am. Although I never hide, even when I’m out in public, down here in this sinister haven I’ve built, I’m at peace.

With that hunger driving me, I stand from the bench, tilting my head to the left and then to the right, hearing a satisfying crack. My fingers inch towards the cuff of my Tom Ford button-down.

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