Blind Date

Arnold looked across the table, over the platters of steaming vegetables and buttery lobster tails, and once again became mesmerized by Renee’s eyes: sparkling, shiny gems set into the hollows of an alabaster face. Eyes like sapphires but bluer somehow, brighter somehow.

Eyes that transcended words.

Eyes that were emotions given life.

These emotions ached through Arnold’s chest as he looked up into them and said, “How’s your lobster?”

The eyes were why she was sitting here across from him. Without them, Renee wouldn’t have been interesting- needless to say admirable- in the slightest. The head and face and body of Renee existed merely to house the eyes. Like the backdrop of canvas behind the Mona Lisa, she was nothing if for not the masterful brushstrokes that decorated her. 

“Fine,” Renee said in an indifferent tone. As if she had no opinion one way or another on the matter. The same way she answered any question, spoke on any subject.

She wasn’t ugly. But you couldn’t find a more lifeless personality in a cardboard box. Her body curved in the right places and her legs were long and shapely, but god, the conversation was worse than the dialogue of the latest Paul Walker film.

Her eyes-gems-emotions swept up to capture Arnold in their gaze, and Arnold felt his heart flutter in his chest for just a moment. They caught him off-guard every time, wiping his mind blank and his senses numb.

God, they would look incredible in Mary.

Mary was really Mary-Anne-Terri-Lauren-Dana-Shelly at the moment, but at one time, Mary, alone, had been Arnold’s definition of the perfect woman. That was long before Mary began to rot, and Arnold realized perfection was something that didn’t last on its own, not forever, but must be maintained. Just like all the finer things in life.

“Would you care to come to my place?” Renee said. “For a nightcap?”

Arnold paused.

“I was really rather hoping we might head to my place. I want to show you something,” Arnold said. He swirled his wine glass with one hand, the epitome of calm, collected, cool-headedness.

He imagined the future readers of his autobiography admiring him at this moment.

“What a smooth operator,” they would say.

“He didn’t even break a sweat,” they would say.

“I’d prefer my place,” Renee insisted. Her eyes swiveled, nervous and brilliant, and came to rest on Arnold, once again breaking off his train of thought.

“I’d feel much more… safe… there. I know it’s a horrible thing to say, but I don’t know you that well and…”

Arnold cut her off with a curt wave of his hand. He shook his head, his face full of understanding, his mind full of fury.

“Completely all right, totally, totally. Trust me, I understand. In this day and age, you can never be too careful. I’d be honored to have a drink at your place.”

“What a brilliant actor,” his readers would say.

“So smooth. So suave,” they would say.

Arnold had a small portion of chemicals in his coat, disguised in a whiskey flask. He’d concocted his own personal secret mix, sure to knock out any woman senseless without leaving any trace in her blood if her body were to be found. But as Arnold had just ironically stated, “In this day and age, you can never be too careful.”

He could put her to sleep at her own place, take her eyes there, and maybe dispose of the body. Perhaps even make it look like a robbery gone wrong. Of course, this wouldn’t explain the absence of her eyes, but if enough smoke was blown in their faces, the cops wouldn’t even be able to see their own two feet.

Mutilation, perhaps? Not his typical M.O. and it might lend a hand to stir up more confusion. Usually, Arnold took what he needed and that was that.

But maybe he’d take his time with this one.

His eyes shifted to the large knife in his hand. It sliced through the steak on his plate. Reddish juices dripped from the blade.

Arnold shivered, anticipating the night before him.

***

Renee’s place turned out to be a single-storied block of wood and cracked and faded brick. A rusty mailbox leaned out into the street in front of a row of white-washed planks of fence, crooked and rotting and jutting up from the ground like the lower jaw of an old woman. Grass grew long and brown in a front yard wild and twisted with weeds.

It looked like a real dump.

“Homey,” Arnold said as he pulled into the driveway.

He followed Renee into the small house, and the inside of it was not much better off than the outside. The first thing Arnold noticed was a dirty plate on the floor. Dried, hairy crusts of red lined it like stringy veins. Old spaghetti sauce, he assumed. Behind the plate sat a fuzzy yellow recliner, orange patches holding it together like splotchy band-aides. The recliner appeared to be on the verge of unraveling. A television blared in front of it, playing one of an endless number of cable news channels.

“Homey,” Arnold repeated.

“What a biting sense of humor,” his readers would say.

“What genius wit,” they would say.

“This way to the booze,” Renee said, and Arnold followed her.

Walking in step behind Renee, Arnold’s right hand crept ever so subtly to his coat. He patted the pocket with his flask as if to reassure himself that it was still there.

Renee passed through a living area and sidled up to an area with a small bar. She slipped behind the counter, rummaged through a tall cabinet, and finally turned with a bottle of bourbon in one hand and two small glasses in the other, held between her thumb and index finger.

“Here we are,” she said. She filled each glass with ice and poured in the bourbon. Arnold eyed Renee’s glass, wondering how to slip in the mix. He’d have to be subtle.

Renee caught his attention with eyes like twin blue flames. Her eyes glided over Arnold’s shoulder. Helpless but to do so, he followed her gaze to a travesty of a tapestry hanging from the far wall. A purple dragon writhed on a backdrop of crimson flames. This would have been relatively acceptable if not for the cartoonish depiction of the dragon, all bug-eyed and snaggle-toothed, and the fact half of a chicken protruded from the dragon’s mouth. It looked like an image from a rejected Japanese children’s show.

“Impressive,” Arnold said, but “ridiculous” was the word that came to mind. He supposed the travesty worked as a good-enough distraction from the disastrous mess of the rest of the home.

He turned around, and Renee held his drink out towards him. Arnold accepted the glass of bourbon with an appreciative nod. He held it up in a toast.

“To us,” he said.

“To us,” Renee agreed and raised her glass. Then they drank.

The bourbon was a slow burn through Arnold’s throat and chest. He smacked his lips and blew a long exhale. Ice tinkled in his glass. Meanwhile, the whiskey flask felt like a lead weight in his coat pocket. Like a stone, heavy on his heart. He needed to do something about it. With every passing minute, he was losing time.

Inspiration struck, and Arnold turned his head from side to side, eyes searching. They settled upon what he was looking for, and Arnold allowed his face to split in an earnest smile. He motioned to the cd player with a nod. Shiny, plastic cases leaned around it like poorly constructed skyscrapers.

“Why don’t you put on some music while I freshen up our drinks,” he said and took Renee’s glass and his own back to the counter of the bar.

“Sure,” Renee said in the tonal equivalent of a shrug. If not for her eyes, she would have been as exciting as a warm glass of ginger ale and a C-Span 3 marathon.

Arnold waited until Renee’s back was turned- apparently searching through the stacks of discs for the appropriate musical mood- to slip a hand into his coat pocket. He pulled out the flask and voided the contents into Renee’s glass. He dipped his hand back into his coat, returning the flask to its hiding place. It had taken but a moment, all too easy.

As Arnold approached Renee from behind, he swirled her glass in one hand, mixing the drug and drink with a sadistic kind of arrogance.

“He makes it look easy,” his readers would say.

“Nobody does it better,” they would say.

“Here you are, my dear,” Arnold said. Renee turned and took the glass.

Arnold swooned, consciousness fleeing him like a lemur off a cliff and the floor rushed up and the world swirled and a kind of dull, pulsing black void swallowed him whole.

***

The end there- the fainting part- that had all rather happened upon Arnold quite abruptly. As he struggled up through the sluggish tar of unconsciousness, his confusion further complicated the progress towards alert thought. Everything had been going smashingly and then… well, and then… and then WHAT?

The question dogged him: What had happened?

With more effort than he ever expected to be necessary, Arnold peeled open his left eye.

Shadows surrounded him, and a dull throb emanated from his shoulder. He felt drowsy, drugged. Yes, drugged! His mind latched on to the word as he happened upon it like a diamond in a bag of straw. He had been drugged. He pulled out the metaphorical diamond and examined it, turned it over in his hand, in his mind. Memories like puzzle pieces jigsawed together. Things began to fit, clicking in place.

Arnold remembered the bourbon, remembered how Renee had distracted him to the tapestry with her eyes. Of course. She must have used the moment to slip something into his drink, the deceptive wench.

Both of his eyes now open, it took some time for Arnold’s vision to adjust to the darkness. The first thing he noticed was his left arm stretched taut up and behind him, chained, a metal cuff around his wrist bolted to the wall. He blinked, uncertain that he was seeing what he was seeing, but the rusty chains and pale white flesh of hand remained. He wriggled his fingers, verifying the ones he saw indeed belonged to him.

Arnold’s heart thumped in his chest as his pulse quickened. Who was Renee, and why was she doing this to him? Was she a friend of one of the girls he had killed? A family member looking to dish out her own source of justice?

Only one of his hands was cuffed. The other was free. Why would…

He caught a glimpse of Renee’s heels by his feet. As his eyes focused, he could see that just above the heels were dainty ankles attached to legs. Renee lay sprawled on the floor, her eyes closed. A crust of vomit lined her lips. More vomit had sprayed across the area near her mouth like a chunky rainbow of bile and regurgitated lobster. A set of keys gleamed in the palm of her open hand.

Arnold paused, thinking, and then smiled. Renee must have drunk his knock-out concoction after he had passed out. Silly fool. Thinking she’d gotten the better of him, she must have dragged him down here to… where? The basement. But she’d only had just enough time to strap one of his hands to the wall before Arnold’s potion had worked its magic. Her body must have tried to reject it, and she’d choked to death on her own puke.

Poetic justice, no?

It still didn’t explain why Renee had brought him down here and chained him to the wall, but that didn’t make much of a difference at the moment.

Arnold stretched out his right leg towards Renee’s body. He could just reach the keys with the tip of his toes. He gritted his teeth. Strained. The keys tinkled as he toed them. He curled his shoe inward, and the keys slipped out of Renee’s motionless palm and clattered to the floor. When he got the keys close, he tried to reach down with his free hand and grab it. The chain shackled to his wrist yanked him back with a rough jerk.

Arnold groaned. He was going to have to do this the hard way. He held his right shoe steady with his left as he slipped out his foot. Then he used the same strategy to pull of his sock. The black sock was damp with sweat, and when it was off, his naked foot felt cold in the basement air. Arnold pinched the key ring between his big toe and his other little piggies and lifted it. He raised his foot just high enough to snatch the keys with his free hand.

“Yes!” he cheered. His mental scoreboard now read, “Arnold: 2, Renee: 0.”

A moment later, he found a key that fit, and the cuff sprang open with a click. Arnold rubbed his wrist and stepped away from the wall, over Renee’s body. Looking down at her, Arnold had an eerie feeling like dozens of ants creeping over his skin.

He imagined her eyes flying open and her hands closing over his ankles. He imagined her scream, and her nails digging furrows into his flesh until it bled. He imagined vomit erupting from her mouth and-

Something moved on the other side of the basement. In the shadows.

Arnold froze. Water dripped from the ceiling.

Plop.

Plop.

Plop.

An old leaky pipe. But other than that, nothing. No more furtive movement, just the rhythmic splash of leaking sewage. After a pause, Arnold was sure that he must have imagined it.

And then it, whatever it was that must have moved, gave a low, guttural moan. The “it” sounded human.

“Who’s there?” Arnold called. His heart thundered in his chest.

“He…” rasped a weak voice. “He…lp.”

“Who’s there?” he repeated.

“Help… m… meeeeeeee.”

The voice wasn’t much more than a cracked whisper, but it managed to raise the hairs on the back of Arnold’s neck. Considering that his own basement contained the stitched together parts of several dead women, it had been quite some time since he had experienced anything he might have considered relative to fear. All the same, Arnold felt an unwelcome sliver pierce his guts.

He took a few cautious steps towards the voice. His footsteps seemed to echo off the floor, louder when he stepped with his left foot because he’d forgotten to put the shoe back on his right. The voice had distracted him.

The first thing Arnold could make out was the glitter of two wide white eyes. They glared at him from the dark. The face around them appeared both sickly and desperate. Long, greasy hang sagged in sweaty clumps, looping and ropy like miniature nooses around a skeletal face. It was a man, or what was left of a man. Not much remained of him but skin hanging loosely from the bones. Metal rattled as the Arnold approached. The man had been chained to the wall.

As he overlooked the thing’s emaciated figure, one like that of a concentration camp survivor, Arnold couldn’t help but think, “This could have been me.”

He swallowed and felt a choking lump in his throat. Renee had done this. She was sick.

“Who are you?” Arnold croaked.

The man rasped, “Be…”

“Be? Ben? Is your name Ben?”

“Be… hi…”

“Be hi? Bee hive?”

“Be… hind! Behind… y… you!”

Realization flooded through Arnold like a lightening strike to the brain, and he turned and had just enough time to see Renee, up and very much alive, bringing the ax to bear.

“DIEEEEEEE!” Renee shrieked like a banshee. Her eyes were wild. Spittle flew from her lips. Her hair swirled in a tornado of fury. Her breath reeked of sour bile.

With a sharp cry, Arnold twisted away and felt the force of the ax whoosh past him and split the hanging man’s head open like a ripe melon. The skull cracked like a nut. A wet splatter of blood and flesh dotted Arnold’s face, making the horrible surrealism of the scene all too real.

“Missed,” Renee groaned with disappointment.

Arnold stumbled backwards, hit a table, and went over it, his legs flying from out under him. He did something of a flip, and for a moment, it was almost graceful, worthy of the ‘Escape a Deranged Killer Olympics.’ But then the floor smacked him hard, and his breath rushed out of his lungs. The table flipped and crashed sideways, throwing an assortment of tools across the room. Gasping for air, Arnold looked up at the Renee, at the hanging man, at the ax.

Blood gushed from the man’s face and mouth. Renee sneered and tried to pull the ax out of the man’s head, but it was wedged deep. Her face was a mask of the fresh blood. Her eyes were white wild orbs in a sea of crimson. Her blue irises blazed bright with insanity.

“I’m the Angel of Death!” she cried and yanked on the handle of the ax. It gave ever so subtly with a squish within the dead man’s head. Another pull and she would have it free. Arnold decided to not wait around that long.

Using the edge of the fallen table for support, Arnold pulled himself to his feet and ran. He heard a wet splat as Renee pulled the ax from the dead man’s skull. Behind him, bits of brain splattered and clung to the ceiling.

“Meet your fate, you foul, foul man,” Renee twittered. She gripped the handle of the ax with two white-knuckled hands. The blade dripped blood as it waved through the air.

Arnold couldn’t see any stairs. He swiveled his head back and forth, hoping to discover any route of escape. He couldn’t see much of anything. Stained sheets hung from the ceiling on lines of wires and obscured his view in a maze of old, rotting fabric. Arnold flung them away with shaking hands. He stumbled into them, through them, feeling the sheets flutter against his skin like cheap ghosts.

He heard something rip behind him. Renee was cutting her way through the sheet-maze with her ax.

“Don’t be a sissy! Come here, and take your medicine like a man. You know you want it. I saw the way you were looking at me during dinner. And what did you slip into my drink, little man? It made me sleepy, so sleepy, but now I’m awake. I got yucky puke all over my pretty green blouse, but I’m awake. And now you’re going to get what you came here for,” her voice echoed through the basement. Arnold thought that it was coming behind him, but between the sheets and way Renee’s voice seemed to reflect off the walls, he couldn’t be sure.

He pushed a sheet out of his way and felt a chill freeze him on his feet. His breath caught in his throat. He couldn’t have been more still if Medusa had turned him to stone. Then, breaking the illusion, a tear leaked from his eye and trailed a wet path down his cheek.

The walls were lined with shelves. On the shelves, jars sat. Within the jars, dark organs floated in milky liquid. Arnold recognized floating brains, floating lungs, floating kidneys, anything that had a name and could be cut out of a body floated somewhere in one of the jars.

On one wall, between the shelves, a sheet hung. Words had been painted across it that read, “Find the demons. Cut them out.”

Arnold swallowed. He remembered what Renee had called herself: “The Angel of Death.”

An operating table, or something that he thought Renee must use as an operating table, sat before him. The reason he thought it was an operating table was due to the fact a body was splayed out on it, its chest cavity split open like a big hungry mouth.

Arnold felt very numb as he walked towards the table. He examined everything with detached eyes as if watching a movie on a screen. Reality didn’t exist. Only the nightmare. He walked in a dream. He’d never felt like this before, not even when he had first strangled Mary and watched her eyes roll up in her head and heard her last wracking breaths and then later when he preserved her body for longevity. Not even then.

Guts had been pulled out and recklessly flung about the room. Intestines trailed out of the cavity and looped to the floor like an overflowing plate of spaghetti. A scalpel had been driven into the man’s eye socket and stuck up like a tiny flagpole.

Arnold licked his lips. The scalpel, yes, this was something he could use. He popped it out of the eye socket and pocketed it. Then his eyes roamed and found the… what was it called… bone saw? Deadly and silent, it waited on the table next to the dead man’s skull.

Something rustled from where he had come. Arnold turned.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Renee said, stepping from behind a long, blood-streaked sheet. She held the ax poised in her hands, ready to swipe it down in a killing arc at a moment’s notice.

“All I want is your eyes,” Arnold replied. “That’s all I want.”

“I’ve seen the evil in you,” Renee said. “And I’m going to cut it out.”

Renee approached, and Arnold took a step back. He bumped the table. His hands were at his sides; his fingers brushed the handle of the bone saw.

The woman who had been Arnold’s date only hours before raised the ax high above her head. Her eyes sparkled like blue sapphires. Her face streamed with red gore. Her gnashing teeth were pink with blood.

She said, “This is for your own good.”

Then she brought the ax down.

Arnold swung his arm out, bone saw in hand. The saw met flesh before the unwieldy ax, slicing through skin like a knife through melting ice cream. An arterial spray of blood splashed across Arnold’s face, blinding him, but the damage had been done. The ax faltered in its flight before falling from Renee’s grip and clanging harmlessly to the floor.

Renee’s hands went to her throat which had become something of a fountain of pulsing blood. Wet runnels of dark red leaked from between her clenching fingers. Her eyes were wide and accusing. And blue, oh so beautifully blue.

Arnold pulled the scalpel out of his pocket. It gleamed in the murky yellow light of overhead florescent. Arnold smiled, his lips peeling back over a set of crocodile teeth. He would take what he had come for.

Renee’s mouth opened, and she gurgled. She staggered, fell to her knees.

“I told you,” Arnold said, “that all I wanted was your eyes.”

The nice thing about Renee’s throat being cut was that she could not scream.

***

The following day’s headline read: “LOCAL SERIAL KILLER BURNS IN HOME.”

Arnold could make it out over the shoulder of the lovely young woman with the paper in her hands. He allowed a slight smirk to curl his lips. He remembered how easily the house had burned, how many flammable chemicals had lined Renee’s shelves. All it had taken was a few broken jars and a single match.

Mary’s new eyes were so blue and so gorgeous that it had made it all worth it. But they made Arnold realize just how many improvements he could make on her. So many things about Mary were becoming less than perfect. More than one part of her was becoming… what’s the word… ripe.

“Horrible,” the young woman said when she noticed Arnold at her shoulder. It took Arnold a moment to realize that the woman had not read his thoughts but was referring to the newspaper in her hands.

“Quite horrible. It’s a wonder that people like that are out there,” Arnold said.

“Yes,” the woman replied and nodded.

Arnold looked at her, smiled, and said, “You know, you have beautiful lips.”

The End.