Best Friends With a Serial Killer: A Short Story By Daphne

So, inspired by the previous post about the weird fan mail that serial killers get, and even the marriage proposals, Daphne has written a short story on what it would feel like to find out the person you thought you knew inside out was a different person entirely.

Strong people don't need other people to fight their battles for them, but it is still nice to know that someone will. Even strong people need to feel like they are loved, appreciated and safe. Making someone feel safe is all you can ever really aim to achieve. Actually keeping them safe is harder, because the world is a horrible place for the majority of the time. Although, inexplicably, if you make someone feel safe even after they have been hurt it helps to repair that damage just one tiny little bit. Creating a world where you coexist without fear even if it is only for a minute or two can make the days more bearable, make the hours pass comfortably and make every dream more tangible.

I felt safe, secure and I trusted my world. Every friend and boyfriend, every member of my family made me feel safe. My world was an impenetrable fortress and no one embodied that more than Rosa. Rosa my best friend. My anchor, we orbited each other. We lived and shared and loved, it was the purest form of love, friendship. We were made to be friends, from the moment we met at the age of seven we were inseparable. She liked dinosaurs and so did I, we both loved to draw and both wanted to be teenagers more than anything in the whole wide world. Teenagers were so cool. Then we were teenagers, kissing boys and sharing all the details. Talking about drinking and what smoking would be like, but never actually trying it. Then came the drinking and the trying of the smoking, and the hating smoking I might add. Drinking stuck. So did the boys. Then there were the heartbreaks and the long nights over the phone sobbing and asking 'why me' and 'what have I done to deserve this?'. Nothing she cooed, nothing.

So what happens when you find out that your anchor, your kindred spirit has a whole other person?An entirely separate entity you never knew. Someone you didn't recognise. We aren't talking 'Fight Club' completely unaware of the alter ego. We are talking repressed personality, total awareness of repressed desires. Dark desires. Never expressing them to anyone, ever. I never knew. Never ever. She was always my Rosa, long auburn ringlets, wide hazel eyes and soft porcelain skin. Gentle voice and petite hands. She was soft, beautiful and delicate. It was all a lie, paradoxical, antithetical, incomprehensible, a lie. I'm still not sure. I just, it just, we just, no one knew. 

It was the day of her wedding. I was wearing a Grecian, drape, lilac dress with plaited straps and detailing at the waist. She looked sublime, it was a small, fitted satin dress with a gauzy outer layer that reached the floor and long bell sleeves. It had a small, scallop-edged collar beaded with pearls and cuffs that matched. She had always been the fashionable one. Her hair was tumbling over her shoulders with a single forget-me-not pinned into a ringlet (something blue, new and borrowed from her neighbour's garden). The wedding was in two hours but we were ready, it was going to be small. I was her only bridesmaid and we were alone in her flat, reminiscing, dancing and crying. Then she stopped, she lifted the needle of the record player and turned to me, smiling a fixed smile. We were twenty eight. I had known her twenty one years and I had never seen this smile, it still makes me feel sick from the fathoms of my stomach when I recollect that smile. The smile that unleashed a swarm of bees into my life, angry, confusion inducing and soul destroying bees.

“I have something to tell you”

“What do you mean? You aren't going to ditch him at the alter are you?”

“I'm not joking Carrie, I. Have. Something. To. Tell. You.”

“Jeeeesus Roes fucking spit it out, you're freaking me out.”

“I've killed people.”

“Haha. Bloody hilarious, no seriously what's up?”, she walked towards me in her ethereal manner with an empty look, it was nothing. It meant nothing. There was nothing there. I knew she meant it.

When you grow with someone, learn their world through their eyes and share yours with them, a few things become clear. When they are joking and when they are deadly serious is one of them. I had never seen her more serious. This was not a joke. I review the memory every single day, repeatedly and I pray to god that what happened after never happened and that it was a joke. I rewrite the past, the world we live in now is just an alternate reality, a shadow of a moment that never happened. A route that was never actually taken just eluded to in a moment of questionable humour. I use this to make myself feel safe, but it is only the illusion of safety. When safety is all you dream of for those you love, finding out that they are the dangerous ones makes you constantly fear every breath or word or kiss or dance will have irreparable consequences.

“Who?”, I finally uttered after a near eternal pause. It wasn't like the films where I would have frozen in shock or dropped what I was holding or screamed or cried or ran; it was like a pain that started in my knees and ran to my hips then seared my stomach and burnt my brain till my eyeballs felt like something was trying to melt them from my skull. The pain of confusion over a reality that I always trusted would be a nightmare. “A woman in a pink dress, my upstairs neighbour, his wife three months later and my fiancé’s ex-girlfriend”, she was cool, collected and her voice still felt like a lavender scented caress to my ears. She was the same person, but simultaneously someone I had never met. “Why?” I didn't run. I was intrigued. If I had had any sense I would have run, not heard details, not asked questions, just left and never looked back. Travelled, met new people. Done everything I had always been too scared to do, because everything I knew I was sure of was actually everything I didn't know. “The woman in the pink dress was having an affair with my boss, his wife was the nicest woman I had ever met. I followed her to her car, then the next time she came in I went down to the car park and cut the brakes. Then I put the pliers back into my bosses tool kit at home when I returned the cookbook I had borrowed from his wife. I stayed for a cup of tea when the police arrived and arrested him later that afternoon.”

“I remember this, you told me that you suspected he was a bit weird all along. I fucking agreed with you. You... I. Fuck.”, I was sick. Violently sick into the waste paper bin at the side of the dressing table, my vomit splashed the mirror.

“My upstairs neighbour played music really loud and smoked lots of weed, he never went to work. He was always making noise, he had very loud sex with his wife and then they would smoke more weed. I asked them nicely to keep it down. They never listened. One day I took some shrooms around while his wife was out. I pretended to take them with him, I convinced him to jump out of the window whilst he was tripping. He died instantly. I left, went to my apartment and waited for the police to arrive and asked if I had seen anything, to which I replied no. Then his wife got a bit suspicious when the case got closed as a simple 'bad trip' scenario. Explaining he never did shrooms. Getting a bit too questioning. She knew it was me. I was sure she knew it was me. I took her some flowers a couple weeks after the funeral to say sorry I couldn't go. She went along with the charade. Offered me some tea. We both knew. What she didn't know is that I had crushed my nan's prescription sleeping pills and poured the powder into her drink. My nan didn't sleep for a week. I ran a bath and put her in it. I put on the washing up gloves and cleaned up my mug and where I had been sitting. Then I took a knife from the kitchen drawer. The biggest. I put it in her hand using my gloved one to make her grip it and slit both her wrists then left her to bleed. The sleeping pills were never mentioned in the paper, it must have looked like an open and closed suicide. No questions asked.”

I wretched. It was a dry wretch. My eyes watered and tears poured onto the beautiful dress, the bridesmaid dress. “No”, I murmured almost inaudibly. I didn't want to hear more. It was already too much, too much to try and believe. It was like a black hole opening in front of me.

She paced across the room toward me and sat on the sofa to my left. She turned her head painfully slowly to look at me, directly in the eye, and continued her grotesquely factual account. “The latest was Denise. I found texts on Michael's phone saying she wanted him back, telling him he could never love me and be loved as she had loved him and he had loved her. He was replying with non-committal responses in either direction as though he was actually considering it. I couldn't lose him. We are getting married. Everyone thinks it was a hit and run. Drunk teenagers something like that. They found the stolen car burning on an industrial estate fifteen miles from the scene of the accident. The driver had left no traces of evidence anywhere. It was my masterpiece. I stole the car from the old dear who lives three streets away. She only uses it on Sunday's and her grandson drives. She lives across from the pub and has had bother from rowdy customers in the past. I was wearing a ski mask, She had left the keys in the car as she always did, no one had stolen anything from her before. She had no reason to be cautious. I hit a few things on the pavement and grazed a few cars just to make the drunk driving believable, but not cause too much of a fuss. I knew Denise ran late at night, with her music in and wouldn't hear the car mount the pavement behind her. It was quick and simple. I knew she was dead from the amount of blood. I got to the estate, torched the car with the mask and clothes then walked across the fields until I reached the main road and caught the half past eleven bus into town. Then I met you for a drink after your awful date where we heard the news from Sandra.”

“You met me, straight after. You fucking met me. You didn't smell of petrol or look mucky or anything.”

“I had a change of clothes waiting at the industrial estate.”

“You planned it. You planned every inch of it. What is wrong with you? I have known you for most of my life, you are my best friend. How have I not seen this? When did the compulsions start? When did imagining violence stop being enough? I mean we fucking joke about killing people but actually fucking doing it, its sick its. Shit. Oh God.” I started to hyperventilate slightly, I wasn't sure how I had managed to be so verbose, I was speaking straight out of panic. Words were flowing form my body before my brain had even registered them as words.

“Three years ago when I was living in Bankfield I was raped.”, she looked up and for a split second I saw the Rosa I knew, then she was gone. Blank Rosa was back. “It was after that night when you were wearing the blue sequinned dress and we were really into mojitos. I was helpless. I managed to remain stable with my social circles and at work, but in my alone time I would snap. I started ringing call centres just to manipulate the people that worked there, to get a reaction, see what would push them to the edge. I poisoned my neighbour's cat because it shat on my doorstep. I had sex with a different man every night for eight months and every single one of them I drugged and branded using that brass ornament I have. There are men you know walking round with branded arse cheeks. They didn't know what had happened or why they were burnt. They just thought it had been a crazy night.”

This woman was not my friend. I thought this woman might kill me. It was true. I could see that it was all true. I tried to vomit again but instead I just spat into the bin. She tried to hold my hair but I pushed her into a book case.

“Why are you telling me?”, I screamed. I hadn't intended for it to be a scream but the words just amplified themselves in my mouth and I was screaming. I think I was crying but I can't tell. The pain was back and I was shaking violently. I could still smell her perfume, it smelled like her and I suddenly felt a lump in my throat, she was my best friend I loved her, she smelled like her. She was her. But my best friend had killed four people that walked this earth. Four human lives were lost at the hands of my best friend. “Because it is too good.” she replied. “ I should have been caught, no one can kill four people without consequence. I need reason. You are my reason. I need create the cracks myself if they won't form naturally.” It hit me. Four people. She is a serial killer. In that moment all I could think was 'I am best friends with a serial killer'.

What did you think of my fledgling attempt? Hope you enjoyed it.