Still, mercifully, Mrs B convinced me to also enter a hook for Heng. I wrote Heng back in 2000 and it is currently in Draft form number 3! And Miss Snark loved the hook. So, I'm back in business with Heng, reworking it now so that I can begin submitting it in a couple of months (he hopes) once it's perfected!
Gosh, so, you'll see the first 759 words on her blog, perhaps this weekend (not 750 as that would end in the middle of a sentence!). But I shall include the first chapter below. For those that may be interested: the second chapter will follow Alice (his boss) and various chapters will have other characters as their POV centre, otherwise I suspect the reader would just want the subject of the book to die a horrible horrible death!
Enjoy:
1
It was three days since Frank emptied the last of the poison into her food.
She still looked shaky but the colour was coming back to her skin. The damned stuff had not worked as well as he had hoped.
His mug of coffee tilted as she lowered it to the table.
“Careful, mum,” he said. “It’ll take you ages to clean that out of the carpet.”
He stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray and shook his head.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that in here,” she said, glaring at the assortment of cogs and gears arranged neatly on the floor in front of him. He shrugged.
“I’m using newspaper.”
She tutted and went back to the kitchen to get her own drink. “I saw Helen at the surgery again, today.” Her voice sounded shrill, even from the other room.
“Yes?” Frank said, carefully greasing a metal disc and slotting it into place.
“She wants to do more tests. I feel more like a pincushion every day.”
“What is she testing for now?”
“I don’t know; something to do with heavy metals. I’m feeling much better, though. I think I’m over the worst of it.
Frank nodded. She certainly was. He looked up at the clock and sighed. Helen would be at the bingo hall for at least another hour.
The light of the television flickered in the corner of his eye as his mum began trawling through the channels. He began to place the discarded ends of rubber tubing into a careful pile beside his untouched coffee as he stripped the ends of the cables and wired the device.
“Oh, before I forget,” his mum said. Frank paused, holding the ends of the wires away from each other. He breathed deeply. “Margaret called earlier. She wanted to know if you could pop over there and take a look at her pipes.”
“From number forty-two?”
“Yes, that’s right. She wouldn’t have asked, but her husband won’t be back for another month yet. I think his ship is still somewhere near Gibraltar.”
Frank nodded. Her timing could not have been better.
“Alright, mum. I’ll just finish this first. Did she say what was wrong?”
“I think it’s that kitchen pipe again. I keep telling her not to pour old fat down the sink but she won’t listen.”
Frank put the last pieces in place and got to his feet.
“I hope you’re not going to leave that there.”
He rolled his eyes. “I was going to put it in the cellar. Could you get the door for me?”
She followed him out into the hallway and opened the cellar door. “It’s freezing down there,” she hissed as a fist of cold air rushed up to meet them.
“The heater’s broken,” Frank said. “I told you last week.”
“Oh, that’s right. Listen, can you fetch me a bottle of wine? Helen said she might come over after bingo.”
“Sure,” he said. She usually did.
He went down the stairs and very carefully placed the device on the shelf. It looked snug, sandwiched between two pyramids of jam jars filled with nitro-glycerine.
Frank set the clock and walked slowly back to the stairs.
He paused by the wine rack and picked out his mum’s favourite. As he climbed the stairs he slipped off the marigolds and left them dangling like a pair of deformed hands over the rail. He shut the door behind him and took the bottle through to his mum.
“I’ll be as quick as I can,” he said, giving her a peck on the cheek. Up close he could see the coarse hairs that sprouted randomly on her chin. The perfume she wore was sweet and cloying. He was glad he would not be home when Helen arrived.
She looked up at him from the corkscrew and smiled. “See you later.”
“Sure,” he said. He glanced around as he took his coat off the hook and nodded to himself. “Bye, then.”
“Bye.”
He stepped out onto the dark street and lit a cigarette. It was a chilly night but at least the rain had stopped. The dark tarmac shimmered gently under the harsh sodium glare of the streetlights. In the distance a dog barked.
He began to walk slowly along the pavement, enjoying the tranquillity. Dyllion Crescent was close to a mile long from end to end and formed a crooked smile on the side of the quietly industrial Devonian town.
The road encircled a small wood and it was this that provided Frank’s shortcut to Margaret’s house. He passed between a pair of houses and through a gap in the hedge. A muddy path had been worn through the woods and Frank followed this briefly into the dark shadows of the trees.
With the confidence of a lifetime resident, he veered off the path and began to wind his way deeper into the wood until he came to a timber shack.
The heavy padlock yielded easily to Frank’s key. Once inside, the door closed again and the black out curtain pulled back across, he lit the lamp.
He smiled and lifted the hood.
Doctor Chang had a suitably uncomprehending look of terror on her face. This was the first time since he had brought her here that he had let her see who he was.
He pulled the needle out of the body on the floor and held it up for her to see. It was the kind used in acupuncture, long and thin. Along its shaft was the congealed redness of its previous lodging and as he brought it closer to her she began to shake her head.
Her nostrils were wide open and furiously snorting air. The thick gag over her mouth allowed nothing through. Her eyes were wide, desperately imploring him to release her.
He set the needle down on the small wooden stool in front of her and sat down on the cadaver. Its face was contorted in an expression of agony and the slash at its throat gaped widely for the doctor to see.
Frank lit the candle that was on the stool and began to heat the end of the needle. Blood was trickling down from the doctor’s wrists where she had opened up the sores, struggling to pull her hands free again.
“No one has noticed you’re gone yet, you know,” he said, conversationally. “Everyone thinks you’re off to the Maldives.” He held the glowing end of the pin out to her. “To be honest, we’re glad to have you off our backs for a while. No one likes to have a bad report on their record.”
He pushed the needle through the bare skin of her leg. It sunk deeply into the tissue at the bottom of her calf muscle and her body convulsed with the sudden pain.
He withdrew the needle and began heating it over the candle again.
“I saw your last report on me. Do you really think it’s the stress of the work environment that’s caused me to emotionally retreat from my colleagues?”
He pushed the needle through her other leg. Her scream, muffled by the gag, sounded exhausted.
“I’ve tried very hard to fit in, you know,” he said, holding the needle back over the candle. “I thought I’d succeeded. Obviously not.”
The needle hissed slightly as he pressed it to her belly. He did not push it deeply this time. He got to his feet as he held the needle against the flesh just above her navel.
“I like working there,” he said. “I find the environment stimulating. If I possessed the slightest ounce of compassion I wouldn’t do what I do. I know all about emotions, Chang. I’ve studied them up close. They’re overrated, trust me.”
He scraped the needle down until it fitted into the crease of her navel. Her gasp of pain was obvious, despite the gag. If her hands had not been roped to the roof beams and her feet bound to the iron ring set in the concrete floor, she would have doubled up.
There was no room for her to manoeuvre and so Frank’s needle was unhindered in its progression through her abdomen. Dark blood mingled with intestinal fluids and all colour drained from her face.
“It’ll take you a while to die that way,” he said. He picked up a long knife from the floor and scraped it down the centre of her body.
The blade was surprisingly sharp. Blood blossomed fast along the length of the deep cut. He watched the pulse at the base of her throat beating its rapid, terrified rhythm and smiled.
“This should help.”
He sank the knife into her throat, slowly easing it open.
She gurgled one last time as the gag fell to the floor.
He untied the corpse and stacked it and the other cadaver in the corner. He slipped out of his dirty clothes, put on a clean overall and picked up his tool kit.
It only took him another ten minutes to get to Margaret’s house. Her husband was fond of garden gnomes and Frank was glad of the patio lights to illuminate a clear path through the garden.
He crouched to stub his cigarette out on a tackily wee red hat before stepping up to the door.
She was a vision in a floral nightdress, her long dark hair bound up in a wet towel. With the light of the hallway behind her, Frank could just make out the shape of her ageing yet ample bosom as she turned to let him in.
“Ah, Frank, thanks for coming. I’m sorry to be a nuisance.”
“That’s okay, Margaret. Always happy to help.”
Her eyes reflected a sudden burst of light and Frank was thrown forward by a deafening detonation. Pieces of masonry smashed through windows and a roofing tile struck Frank a painful blow across his back as it shattered through Margaret’s open front door.
Margaret screamed, but the ringing in his ears was all that Frank could hear.
He looked at his watch.
Bang on time.
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