Diary of a Teenage Serial Killer Read online

  Diary of a Teenage Serial Killer

  Jem Fox

  Also by Jem Fox

  Murder Vision

  The House Under Hammett Hill

  Forthcoming

  Lie Down with Dogs

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to events, places, or people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Covert art: Woman Scorn by David Wheeldon, incorporating Cannibal Girl by Manos Simonides and Severalls by Rob Walker under a Creative Commons license. Use of the artists’ artwork in no way implies their endorsement of this book.

  Published by

  Poisoned Plum Press

  415 N. Dunlap #96

  Savoy, IL 61874-0096

  Copyright © 2012 by Jem Fox

  The accepted definition of a serial killer is a person who kills at least three times with a cooling-off period in-between his murders. — criminal profiler Pat Brown

  The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you. — David Foster Wallace

  My father said you had to have a good reason to kill a person. But he always had a reason.

  He taught me about the world we live in, you and me. He told me the priests and the Cub Scout leaders are pedophiles, the rich people are consumed with greed, every salesman has his hand in your pocket, and the only thing a boy wants from you, Darla, is to use your body to satisfy his animal urges.

  He told me everybody lies. We studied syllogisms in school. Philosophy 101: Logic. Everybody lies. My father is part of everybody. Therefore, my father lies.

  The only thing was, I spent 15 years with him and I never could tell when he was lying.

  This diary was James’s idea. He said I needed to examine my own narrative. He said I had to close the book on my father’s story and start writing Darla’s story. I didn’t have to let him read it, but he would like to read it, if I let him.

  Now I’m still writing my story and there’s no one left to read it. But I try to remember what James said: that it was mostly for me. So I could take a step back and try to make sense of the things that happened to me. So I could tease apart the pieces of the story that were my father’s and the pieces that are mine.

  I think James thought I’d mostly write about the past. But the thing is — that shit just keeps on happening.

  I argued with James that my father was not a serial killer. I watch TV. I see movies. A serial killer wants to kill people. Then they choose who to kill. The desire comes first, then the plan. Maybe they have some rules, like my father had rules, but my father wouldn’t have killed anyone if everyone had just let him the hell alone. He didn’t have “kill someone today” at the top of his to-do list. He just set a straight path and walked it and unfortunately people tended to cross it, or cross him. He said everyone he killed deserved to die.

  But again, he was the one who decided what people deserved.

  I don’t want to kill anyone. I see myself in those kids whose dads want them to hunt, but the kid wants no part of it. No thanks, Dad. Not for me. When you go in the big outdoor stores, they have those snapshots on the bulletin board by the front door, all those kids posing with dead bucks, holding up their lifeless heads by the antlers. Posing in camo with one knee in the mud, smiling for the camera. How many of those kids just go along because they know the reward will be a little attention from Daddy? How many of them wake up on a Saturday morning in November and think, you know what I want to do this morning? I’m eleven, and I cannot imagine a better way to spend this bright autumn day than getting up at 4:30 in the morning, sitting in the cold, dark woods, and murdering some deer who’s peacefully nibbling a shrub. Then I’ll pose with his corpse, watch my dad tip a few Budweisers with his friends, and call it a day.

  My father trained me the way those kids were trained by their dads. How to shoot, how to use a knife, how to lay in wait for prey, how to wait for the clean kill. How to keep my complaints about the cold and discomfort to myself.

  He filled me up with training I didn’t want to use and wasn’t interested in practicing, but it just kept coming. He pointed out the Pedophiles, the Liars, the Cheats, the Thieves, the Rapists. The Crazies with the stumbling walk who veer toward you as if drawn by the smell of your blood. He told me how to dispose of them quickly, cleanly, and how to walk away and leave no trace. He prepared me for war, and he convinced me that we were in that war and the two of us were the only ones on our side. And the war would never end. Hoorah.

  Still, I went 15 years without killing anyone. I have my own rules. If someone crosses my path, I ignore them. If they cross me, I ignore them. I don’t kill anyone unless I think they’re aiming to kill me. Those are my rules.

  There is the ability to do a thing and then there is the willingness to do the thing.

  It’s a statistical truth that most people who own handguns are unwilling, when it comes right down to it, to shoot another person, even if that person is a Bad Man bent on doing them wrong in their own home. Even if they wake up naked under the covers and find evil standing at the foot of the bed.

  They think a gun is a sort of remote control and they can hold it up and point it at the scene underway and say “Pause”. “Mute”. “Off”. When they realize that it is not a remote control but an instrument of death, they hesitate and are lost.

  Funny that people own an instrument of death and have never thought about the taking of human life, but that’s how it is.

  It’s an awkward time to realize that you are not, after all, capable of causing someone’s death — the very moment you find yourself smack dab up against evil intent in your own bedroom. You have the impulse to hand the gun over to the bad guy — here, I just realized this is more your kind of thing than mine. And the bad guy is happy to oblige. And now he has a gun.

  Many people can learn to shoot a gun or handle a knife; not that many are willing to use it to end another person.

  Nature? Nurture? I tend to lean toward the latter, though with my family heritage, obviously I can’t form a good argument against the former. I have never doubted that my father was my real biological father. I inherited his almost colorless gray eyes, his high forehead, his slight build, and his remarkable lack of empathy.

  I knew that I could kill when I was eight years old. We were cutting across the countryside from a train track toward town. My father had slowly gained ground, leaving me further and further behind, as was his habit. If I stopped to do anything at all other than trudge, he said I was lollygagging. So I was walking through a gully by myself when the dog came out of nowhere and attacked me.

  Maybe I was trespassing. Maybe it was rabid. I don’t know. I’m not that familiar with canine psychology. Whatever the reason, it was hellbent on ripping into my tender girl flesh and there wasn’t going to be the opportunity for a sit-down discussion on the matter.

  I didn’t have to stop and think, Oh God, am I the sort of person who would harm a dumb animal, even in self-defense? Nature? Nurture? I killed that dog. Cut him down in the prime of his life without turning a hair. It was him or me. I chose me. That’s when I set my rule. Before that, I’d thought I would never kill anyone. I’d decided that. (Easy thing, you might say, seeing as how I had my father with me 24/7 and he was going to kill anyone that endangered me, but still. I had articulated it.) After that, I slightly changed my outlook. I would only kill someone who set
out to kill me first. Looking down at that dead dog, it seemed more realistic.

  I’m not going to tell you how to kill a dog. I’ve read those zines down at the college bookstore — the ones that tell you how to hop a train or scavenge food in the city. This is not going to be a many-times-xeroxed tome of how to kill dogs. Google it.

  It’s not hard to kill. It’s just a different skill set. I keep reading book and movie reviews where they praise the “kick-ass heroine”. Do you know what a kick-ass heroine is? It’s someone who fights back and wins. Do you know what they call someone who fights back and loses? A statistic.

  You could go out tomorrow and buy a knife. Buy a gun. Learn how to use it. Take a judo class or whatever — we don’t all have daddies willing to whip us themselves until we learn how to fight. Do what you have to do.

  And when you’re all done, and you have the gun skills and the knife skills and the kicking and punching skills, figure out if you have the thing you can’t buy — the willingness to use them to snuff out someone’s life. Or don’t. But it’s probably more useful to know now, before you wake up and find the stranger in your bedroom.

  Here is the problem I have with the lessons Daddy pounded into my head. Truth from lies. Sane from crazy. How do you know what’s what? All the time things happen and his words rise up in my mind like a fish surfacing in a pond. Or like a bad taco coming back up your throat. That greasy thug trapped me in the food locker and smirked at me and I thought, goddamn you, Daddy. Right again.

  Robby has that bad acne, the stuff that parents with money take their kids to the dermatologist to fix. It looks like somebody took a cheese grater to his face. It hurts to look at him.

  He stood there between me and the door, leering at me, so sure that he was going to get what he wanted. Like I was going to so desperately want to keep my job stirring cauldrons of cafeteria chili that I would bend over for him by the giant cans of tomato sauce. Like I would rather lose my virtue than my hairnet.

  When these things happen, I don’t feel rage. I just feel tired. Bone tired.

  “Hey baby—“

  I cut him off. I really did not want to hear the words that were going to come out of his mouth. He wasn’t going to physically assault me, and he wasn’t going to do me any emotional damage. I refused to let him drop his garbage-y words into my brain where they would take an eternity to decompose.

  “Robby, move.”

  He was irritated that I’d cut off his speech. He took a breath to start again, and he eased forward a little, bending his knees slightly like a farm boy gearing up to chase a greased pig.

  I stood in front of him, not flinching, not shrinking back, totally relaxed. I didn’t show fear, but then, I didn’t feel any fear. I just felt a pinching between my eyes that foretold of a headache and the deep exhaustion already mentioned. I reached out and took a regular-size can off the shelf and hefted it in my right hand. His eyes went there and he barked a laugh. Like, bitch, do you think you’re going to throw that can at me?

  He started to talk again and I threw it at his private parts, hard. I have excellent aim. My father drilled me on throwing rocks. You may not have a gun and you may even have, somehow, lost your knife — although my father would not have countenanced that — but you can almost always find a rock, at least in the places where we usually lived.

  I could kill a good-sized bird with a rock at ten paces, so you can imagine what damage I did to poor Robby’s crotch.

  I didn’t lean over and whisper anything in his ear or make a speech, and I didn’t kick him in the kidney as I walked past or stomp his knee. I really didn’t think he’d bother me again after that. Bullies are usually so docile when they figure out they accidentally went after a non-victim. He seems that sort.

  Of course, I knew I hadn’t bought his permanent absence. Unless he decided to quit his job, but I doubted he’d do that. We don’t have the kind of lives where you quit your job if you have a bad day. We exist in the economic strata that actually requires a constant thin stream of money to survive. So he’d probably come to work again as soon as he could walk.

  My father would have said Robby is a Pervert and a Rapist and he needs to be put down before he traps some other poor girl in a pantry. But my rules state that it’s every woman for herself. Rocks are free. There’s nothing stopping you from building up some muscle and practicing your aim.

  I stepped over Robby and hung up my apron. I had two more hours on my shift, but I was done for the day. I tapped on the door of Merle’s office and she looked up from her computer.

  “I just threw up. I got to go home.”

  She made a face. “Get on, then. Feel better. Can you call someone to cover before you go?”

  I held onto my stomach and shook my head no fast. She pointed to the door. “Go!” No one wants vomit in the kitchen.

  The next time I saw Robby, I expected things would slide back to the way they were before he thought to come after me in the food locker. We’d avoid looking each other in the face, he’d think I was a cold dyke bitch who used to play Little League, and I’d stir my cauldron of chili and think my own thoughts.

  Unfortunately, it didn’t go that way.

  I had hours to kill and nothing to do with myself. My homework was done. It wasn’t challenging. I’m living in a bland Midwestern town with the flavor and personality of a Saltine cracker with no salt. I’m majoring in Business Management. From what I can tell so far, it’s preparing me to work the counter at the gas station. My guidance counselor says I will be employable in a variety of semi-professional occupations. I’m frankly just aiming for something where I won’t have to wear an apron or overalls and absolutely nothing made of rubber. No rubber apron, no rubber gloves — you get the idea. No philosophy major, no sociology, no arts and crafts — I need a degree that will point me toward a desk by an air conditioner.

  I’m just going through the motions, doing the paperwork, phoning it in. I don’t participate in class, and absolutely no one cares. I have spent some time in various schools and sometimes they make a real point to insist that you raise your hand and get in on the discussion. Not here. There are two or three people in every class who take it on themselves to do all the heavy lifting, and everyone else slumps down and puts their eyelids at half-mast. I’m one of those. I’m a solid B– student. I’m never going to pass on a good TV movie to make my paper on Upton Sinclair 10% better. No professor is ever going to pull me aside and tell me he thinks I have something really special.

  So I had no homework in my backpack that I needed to do. There was no reason to go to the library. There was certainly no reason to take three different buses back to my crappy apartment that looks ten times worse in the daylight. I had about two dollars in my pocket so my dining options were extremely limited.

  I decided to walk across campus to the Natural History Museum. It was more like a museum of taxidermy blended with a science-flavored episode of “Hoarders.” It takes up the whole third floor of the Natural History building, and from what I can tell, they’re storing old professors on the top two floors.

  Along the way, I stopped at a kiosk and bought a large coffee, black. I had nothing to eat and no money to buy food, but hunger pangs weren’t enough to drive me back to the apartment before I had to be there. I’d shut my stomach up with the coffee, then drift around the museum and just relax for once. There’s never anybody else there.

  It did occur to me that Robby might hit back after he got up off the floor. It was no use telling Merle not to give him my address. There’s always some lie to tell to weasel information or some way to sneak into the office and get it off the computer. If he wanted to find me, he would.

  It didn’t occur to me that he’d hit back a little faster.

  Just before I got to the Natural History building, I cut down a quiet walkway, the kind with some trees in pots and a couple benches and no people hanging out because it’s so far away from everything. Between classes there would be a stream of students cu
tting through there, but right then it was dead.

  I took four steps and realized there was somebody walking up fast behind me. I popped the top off my coffee. I heard him say, “Hey, bitch” and take two quick running steps to catch up to me.

  When I whipped around he was reaching out to grab my shoulder, and his expression signaled his ill intent. I threw my coffee in his face.

  He screamed and tried to wipe it away but it stuck and burned. It was Ramón, another guy who works in the cafeteria. If he hadn’t cursed at me, I might have thought he was just saying hello. If I didn’t know he was supposed to be working right now. Robby must have told him to follow me.

  He was bent over and shaking his head like a dog with a burr in his ear and he took a big swing out at me without really seeing. I hopped back out of his range, then turned around and left. He screamed out a string of uncomplimentary-sounding words in Spanish.

  I went on to the museum. Ramón isn’t the sharpest pencil in the box. I figured he’d think I was running for help or I had a class or an appointment with a professor. I really doubted he knew about the free museum on the third floor with the molting stuffed animals and the butterflies on pins.

  Inside, I climbed the wide stone stairway and walked over to a window on the landing to peer down on the courtyard and see if Ramón was still there. He was stumbling back toward the quad.

  Now I probably have to get a new job, and that’s a problem. The institution arranged for my work-study, and they droned on and on about how lucky I was to get the spot and how many people want them, blah blah blah. I’d rather have a job off their books anyway, but it isn’t allowed. I’m still under their microscope, still wearing their invisible ankle bracelet.

  I won’t report what happened with Robby. I’m not going to instigate anything official. I know Robby and Ramón won’t mention what happened. But I can’t watch my back every second worrying about one of them dropping a pot of boiling water on me, not when there are two of them and only one of me.