The first thing she realized was how dizzy she felt, as if she were stuck in a hazy dream with no way of waking up. Her mouth was bone dry and her tongue felt like sandpaper. Then she noticed the smell – dirty, damp, moldy, old and sickening. She had no idea where she was, but it smelt as if the place had been neglected for years. In spite of the horrible stench, Susan’s lungs demanded that she took in a full breath of air, and as she did, she could almost taste the rancid quality of the room. One deep breath and it made her gag.

All of a sudden, between desperate coughs, sharp and excruciating pain came to her. It took her exhausted body a few seconds to finally home in on it. It was coming from her right arm.

Susan realized then that she was sitting down on some sort of hard and terribly uncomfortable chair. Her wrists were tied together behind the chair’s backrest, her ankles to the chair’s legs. She was soaking wet, drenched with sweat. She tried lifting her head, which was awkwardly slumped forward, and the movement sent waves of nausea rippling through her stomach.

She couldn’t identify the light source inside the room, maybe a corner lamp or an old light bulb hanging overhead, but whatever it was, it bathed the room in a weak yellowish glow. Her eyes finally moved right and tried to focus on her arm and the source of the pain. She still felt groggy, so it took a moment for her vision to steady itself and for the blurriness to dissipate. When it did, her heart was filled with terror.

‘Oh, my God.’ The words dribbled out of her lips.

An enormous chunk of skin was missing from her arm – from her shoulder all the way down to her elbow. In its place she saw raw, blood-soaked flesh. For an instant, it looked as if the wound were alive. Blood was cascading down her arm, over her hands, through her fingers, and onto the concrete floor, forming a large crimson pool at the feet of the chair.

Instantly, Susan jerked her head away and vomited all over her lap. The effort made her feel even weaker, even dizzier.

‘Sorry about that, Susan,’ she heard a familiar voice say. ‘You could never really stand the sight of blood, could you?’ Susan coughed a few more times and tried to spit the awful vomit taste from her mouth. Her eyes moved forward, finally focusing on the figure standing in front of her.

‘Lucien . . .’ she said in a feeble whisper.

Flash images of last night at the Rocker Club came back to her. Then she remembered sitting in Lucien’s car . . . the angry way he had looked at her. And then nothing.

‘What . . .’ She was unable to finish the sentence, her throat way too frail to produce the sounds. Instinctively, her eyes shot toward the raw flesh in her right arm once again and her whole body shivered.

‘Oh,’ Lucien said, unconcerned, reaching behind him. ‘Don’t worry about that. I don’t think you’ll miss this horrible thing, will you?’

He showed her a large glass jar filled with some pale pink liquid. Something was floating in it. Susan squinted, forcing her tired eyes, but still couldn’t tell what it was.

‘Oh, sorry,’ Lucien said, picking up on her confusion and reaching inside the jar with his gloved hand to collect the floating object. ‘Allow me to show you. The edges have curled in a little bit now.’ He uncurled them and stretched the wet piece of skin he had carved off her arm less than an hour ago. ‘This is a hideous tattoo, Susan. I have no idea why you’d think that this is cool in any way.’

Acid-tasting bile found its way back into Susan’s mouth, resulting in a new desperate gagging/coughing frenzy.

Amused, Lucien waited until it was over.

‘But I think that it will make a great token,’ he said, nodding a couple of times. ‘And do you know what? I do think that I will give the “token collector” thing a shot. See how it makes me feel. Test the theory behind it. What do you think?’

Susan’s head throbbed with the rhythm of her thudding heart. The rope that had been used to tie her wrists and ankles felt as if it had cut through to her bones. She wanted to speak, but fear seemed to have erased every word from her terrified mind. Her eyes, on the other hand, mirrored her fear and desperation.

Lucien returned the tattooed piece of skin to the jar.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I’ve had that syringe hidden in my car for almost a year now. I thought about using it many times.’

Susan breathed in and the air seemed to travel into her nose in lumps.

‘But never on you,’ Lucien moved on. ‘I thought about picking up a prostitute many times. As I know you’ll remember from our criminology classes, they are easy targets – approachable, accessible and, most of the time, anonymous.’ He shrugged indifferently. ‘But unfortunately it didn’t quite work out that way. I never really felt ready for it before, but tonight I felt different. I guess I can say that tonight I felt my first real “killer’s” impulse.’

Tears welled up in Susan’s eyes. To her, the air inside the room became denser, even more polluted . . . almost unbreathable.

‘I felt this amazing drive to simply do it and not think of the consequences,’ Lucien said.

His eyes shone with a new purpose. Susan saw it, and that sent a new current of panic traveling through her body.

‘So I decided not to fight it,’ he proceeded, moving a step closer. ‘I decided to act on it. So I did. And here we are.’

Susan tried to calm her breathing, tried to think, but everything still felt like a horrible dream. But if it were, why wasn’t she waking up?

‘Lucien . . .’ she said, her voice rasping, catching on her swollen throat, ‘. . . I don’t kno—’

‘No, no, no,’ Lucien interrupted, shaking his left index finger at her. ‘There’s nothing you can say. Don’t you see, Susan? There’s no turning back now.’ He stretched his arms out to his sides, calling attention to the room. ‘We’re here now. The process has started. The floodgates are open, or any cliché sentence you’d care to come up with. But no matter what, this is happening.’

That was when Susan noticed the look in Lucien’s eyes – distant and ice cold, like a man without a soul. And it paralyzed her.

Her fear filled Lucien with excitement. He was expecting that excitement to conflict with something inside of him – maybe morals, or emotions . . . he wasn’t quite sure what, but something. That conflict never came. He felt nothing but exhilaration to be finally doing something he’d fantasized about for so long.

Susan wanted to speak, to scream, but her panic-frozen lips wouldn’t move. Instead, her eyes begged him for mercy . . . mercy that never came.

Without any warning, Lucien exploded forward, and in a flash his hands were on Susan’s neck.

Her eyes went wide with terror, her neck muscles tightened as her body tried to defend itself from the attack, her jaw dropped open, gasping for air, but her brain knew that the battle was already lost. Lucien’s thumbs were already compressing Susan’s airway, while his large palms were applying enough pressure to the carotid arteries and jugular veins to cause significant occlusion, and interfere with the flow of blood in her neck.

When Susan’s body started kicking and wriggling on the chair, Lucien placed most of his body weight on her lap to keep her steady. That was when he felt something collapse under his thumbs. He knew then he had just crushed her larynx and trachea. Susan would be dead in seconds, but Lucien never stopped squeezing, at least not then. He carried on until he had fractured the hyoid bone in her neck, all the while his mad and frantic-looking eyes locked on to Susan’s dying ones.

Forty-Five

Hunter sat in silence. Not once did he interrupt Lucien’s account of events, which was conveyed coldly and without sentiment, but all throughout it Hunter fought to keep his emotions in check.