Page 100 of An Unwilling Earl
He liked reading the newspaper accounts of the murders. All sorts of speculation and they were all wrong. They thought he was of a lower class. They thought he was uneducated.
He grinned to himself.
“I’m going to church in the morning and you need to go with me. People are beginning to wonder where you are, and I can’t keep telling them that you’re ill.”
“You never said what Charlotte said about me.”
“Oh, please, Edmund. Must you harp on that? It was nothing.”
“Tell me.”
Edmund knew that his mother feared him. She’d started fearing him when he’d grown taller than her, then stronger. When he’d grabbed her hand when he was fourteen years of age and nearly broke her fingers as she’d tried to hit him.
She’d been furious but stopped beating him and resorted to name-calling and berating. He could tune that out.
Then she’d started to fear him more when she’d found the dead cat.
It’d been the first one, and he’d not known what to do with it, so he’d thrown it out in the mews behind the house. She’d caught him, and he could see the fear in her eyes. She told him that what he’d done was a sin and that he was going to go to hell if he didn’t repent.
He pretended to repent while he continued to catch the feral cats.
His head was pounding harder. He thought of the head upstairs, and his member grew stiff in his pants. That was a sin, too. Wanting to use his member to do things with women.
But he never did. As much as he wanted to. As much as his member hurt, he wouldn’t do that. It was wrong.
It was a sin.
But whenever he thought of the heads his member got stiff, and it hurt, and sometimes he had to touch it to stop it from hurting, and bad things happened then.
It was really stiff now, and his head was hurting, and he had a nearly uncontrollable urge to go hunting. Hunting for women. It was too soon after the last one. He couldn’t go now. It was too soon.
Shut up, Mother!
She was talking about Charlotte again, about how ungrateful the girl was.
He just wanted it to stop.
Stop for good.
He curled his fingers around the cold metal handle of the knife he used to cut his meat.
She wasn’t even paying attention to him. Shoveling food in her mouth. Talking, talking, talking.
Her voice was like a thousand bees buzzing in his head.
He stood up and walked to the other end of the table.
She’d stopped talking, and it was such a relief. The silence was beautiful.
“What are you doing?” she asked. He could see her chewed up food in her mouth. She tried to swallow, but it wouldn’t go down. Her face lost color, and fear entered her eyes.
He knew that fear. Knew it intimately. It was the same fear he saw in the eyes of all the women he killed.
“Sit down, Edmund. We are not finished eating, and you did not ask to be excused.” Her chin was quivering, but the fear was still there, still vibrant.
He raised the knife, and her eyes popped open. Food came tumbling out of her mouth.
He plunged the knife into her chest. She tried to scream, but he covered her mouth with his hand and stabbed again. And again. And again.
