The Invisible Man

The Invisible Man

by Timothy Bird
December 30, 2008

He stood in the middle of the room, shoulders hunched, and vulturine head bowed. He was a contradiction this creature, a man in form alone. The room was dim, and his figure melded with the gloom as if he were not a creature of light as men are, but a being of the shadows. Yet at the same time, he shone with an intensity that spoke of not just a fire within, but a forge, stoked and fed to a blinding inferno to rival the fires of hell themselves. Many women have been unfortunate witness to this; his true being unmasked, but none have survived the experience. Most prayed for death long before it came.
He stood in the middle of the room, head bowed. His right hand trembled, and the blade of the straight razor flashed momentarily in the dim light. His forehead glistened with the sweat of his exertion, and his breath hitched in his scrawny throat, Adam’s apple bobbing grotesquely. The blood that soaked his wiry forearms dribbled slowly down, eventually forming droplets on the fingers of his left hand, and the blade of the razor in his right. One by one, they fell to the floor, making small splashes in the pools at his feet, drops in the ocean of blood that was his legacy.
The silent figure stood in stark contradiction to the chaos surrounding him. He was an empty vessel, his rage now filling the room around him. As he stood in the room, he slowly began to regain himself. His thoughts became coherent and centered, and he began to assess his work. His tongue darted out of his mouth and licked his lips between breaths which were gradually slowing. His eyes took in every detail of the mutilated corpse. The object of his rage, or the brilliant results of his artistic effort? It made little difference in the end. The importance of his work was in the act itself, and the result was nothing more than a pleasant by-product of his glorious mania.
He did not know her name, and he did not care to find out. She was one of them, and that was all that mattered in his demented mind and his twisted view of reality. She was one of those arrogant, awful people that acted like he was invisible. They acted like he did not MATTER.
He had taken her in a mall parkade as she was leaving for the day. It was easy really; no one noticed the invisible man. He enjoyed the irony. He had walked up behind her as she was placing some bags in her trunk. A simple thing to knock her out with his little stun gun; he enjoyed the look on her face as the high voltage coursed through her body, replacing the arrogant look of superiority with one of pain and fear, and finally the blankness of unconsciousness. He quickly flipped her limp body into the trunk, took the keys from the lock, and drove away. The whole thing took less than thirty seconds, and there were no witnesses to the abduction.
An hour later she was hanging in a small storage room in an old building that he rented under a false name. He had needed to stop twice to use the stun gun on her on the way. He smiled at the thought; he rather enjoyed it. Unlike the terror and agony that his personal attentions caused, the stun gun stripped a person down to their bare bones; it wiped all pretence from a individual, leaving the true face exposed. In his world, it was the GREAT EQUALIZER. What came next however, had nothing to do with equality; this was revenge, and a terrible release of rage and frustration in its purest form.
He stood and contemplated her as she hung like an animal in his own personal slaughterhouse, patiently waiting for her to regain consciousness. He could have sped up the process with smelling salt, but he rather liked watching them awake naturally. He enjoyed the slow waking, and the gradual realization of the situation in which they have found themselves. The dawning of mortal terror on a blank face was a thing of beauty, a work of art that he himself could never hope to duplicate.
Finally her attention was on him, the silent, watching figure in the shadows. Her eyes widened in fear and apprehension, and he remained still a long moment, allowing the fear to build. Finally he approached, slowly and ominously, and stared into her terrified face.
“Do you see me now?” he whispered. He glared with frightening intensity. “Do you see me now?” 
“Please” she whimpered, “please let me go. I don’t even know you.”
He struck her face with a terrible roar, and grabbed a handful of her hair, shaking her head viciously. “My name is Richard Keen you fucking bitch! DO YOU SEE ME NOW?”
She wailed in fear and desperation, and cringed back from his wrath as far as her bondage would allow. She screamed in pain and terror as he began to cut into her soft flesh with the hard, gleaming metal of the straight razor.


The woman hung from the rafters by a length of rough hemp twine, the bristly fibres cutting into her wrists. She was up on her toes, the dead weight of her body pulling hard on her slim shoulders. Her head was down as if she had fallen asleep. Her face however, was anything but peaceful, the once beautiful features frozen in a horrible rictus that spoke of a slow, painful death. Her long, blonde hair hung in bloody, sweaty mats across her face.
He stared intently at her face for a long moment, and then walked slowly across the floor until he stood in front of the hanging body. Reaching out a scrawny, bloody hand, he brushed the hair away from her forehead. He bent over and looked into her eyes; blue and beautiful and horrible in death.
“Do you see me now?” he said quietly, and turned away with a little smile.

word count: 1018