A void (short story)

Just as he was ready to pound the wall with his clasped fist in a fit of extreme enragement the doorbell ran a soothingly short amount of time and he got up and about his business. It was go time, and he knew it. He checked himself in the small, rectangular mirror just inside of the hallway and saw that all was fine –a damn fine looking man, or so he opinioned. And then he opened the door and as soft and refreshing air filled the small hallway that somehow reeked of wet shoes although he kept those elsewhere, and as he looked at the hapless young woman in front of him, it dawned to him that he liked her just fine…well, just fine enough, to be more correct.
She was deliciously exotic, but not altogether black; she was more a lightly brownish tint of color, painting the smooth and hairless arms, one of which she extended in the beginning of a salutary handshake. Her long and blackish hair extended roughly halfway ass-ward. Her black eyes seemed inexplicably joyful and bright. Yes, she was a fine specimen of femininity –the type that men look at, cry about, flirt with, yearn for… But to him, she was just a spicy and nearly done piece of meat, and he was the proverbial butcher, waiting for the moment to make a mighty meal.
As he extended his hand in a mirroring gesture, waving a flash of a smile, a brief flash, which she answered with a genuine and broader one, he remembered the little amount of laboring sweat dripping down the forehead when he saw the advert on the board of the community college, and, being equipped with a near perfect memory for the irrelevant details man busies himself with, engraved in his mind the information it contained. The girl, called Anna, wished to learn the language he spoke so naturally, being born in the titular country, in exchange for a course in fluent Spanish. He could not possibly care any less about Spain or any Mediterranean country for that matter, but he did care about Anna and all that came before her and so he answered immediately, removing the advert somewhat later, when nobody was minding other people’s business and he threw the crumbled paper carelessly in a smelly container of garbage and cigarette stumps. He informed the lass that he was most interested in learning the basics of the Iberian language, and would exchange the advantage of speaking to a native with reciprocity. She obviously had no live, eagerly mailing the same day, the same hour actually, and accepted his deal, and he had smiled, peering to the hellishly lit screen over the edge of his well-deserved glass of Scotch. The arrangement was quickly made, over the chat function of his, naturally false account, and here she was, and so was he. And it was very promising indeed, say I and so would he.
He stepped back into his apartment, courtly inviting her to advance over the door step and he contemplated whether he saw a glitch of hesitation before doing as invited and he smiled in the darkness of the closing hallway. He motioned to the door with his keys, a very portent of what was awaiting, a clear sign of intent, yet she happily let him pass, him smelling her wonderfully scented perfume and slightly frotting her, and he locked the door, controlling the lock twice.
He fancied to wonder about the simplicity and undeserved trustfulness common among common women; that she would willingly fall for the trap laid, accept the unusual venue for a first meeting, and not even so much as frown as he checked the closed door, albeit he did so in a very convincing casual action. Indeed, such folly mankind oozes, being of lighthearted nature, in deviance of the Darwinian struggle for life and oxygen.
He lead her on into the main room, in which he liked to move all of his current project, although not at once, lest he loses some, and it was there, in the absence of any family pictures, seeing the abundance of books about the occult and degenerate villains, in the drawn curtains and crack in the mirror dominating the south wall, that she should have seen the signals that open view gave her, but it was not be that day, that girl, who simply seated her heavily sought after derriere on the red couch, not half of a yard near him, and he sat down to, but did so in an overly dramatic, slow motion, as to give her the idea she was with a man of extremes. Again, if the message entered her inferior brain –inferior caused by optimism- it did not show at all and she even complimented him on his nice apartment, which, location wise, was indeed ideally suited for most people who could not afford it, like her, or so he guessed. He stood up again, in similar slow motion, and asked her about her coffee needs –indeed, needs, for people the age of students as she and him too, cannot live, cannot function properly, without unhealthy amounts of the black fluid. She liked a small amount of sugar and just a pinch of milk. Naturally he dumped way too much of both ingredients, because he simply did not care about it, being completely devoid of basic human manners –manners instilled in the apelike race by state and church lest they get out of control and start to destroy all and everything, even all and everything they love most, for humanity in a most nature like state, is destructive beyond the normal imagination. People, however, accept the rules of the game and behaved for the most part, or confined their inner beastness to the privacy of their homes; but not him, dear God not him. He took a bottle of coke for himself, actually containing some illegal coke, if you feel me, for he liked to experiment (in all meanings of the world, to be honest) and could not perform all of his rituals without being slightly under the influence of nefarious drugs or booze and so it had been on every previous times with all those that had come and gone before Anna, and it would be equally so with those after her. For the moment however, the friendly Spanish teen was all he thought about and his concentration was at its utmost –for in times when he was alone, his mind simply lapsed into the world, the realm of fantasy, fuelled by his remarkable memory, which provided him with an unending stream of imagery from all those that had been his guests before Anna, and it filled him with the anticipation of what would happen with those that came after, for this was not to be the last time, just as it was certainly, decidedly not the first.
He handed her the cup and sat next to her, unnoticeably closer, a matter of a few inches. And then she began to talk, without invitation, enquiring, or reason given by him, just a nice little lady chatting away. And the way she made a habit of giggling every now and then came close to defrosting his Siberian heart. She was a splendid person, one who makes friends easily, at least among the menfolk. But it was more a charade, a play in which only half of the actors were aware of it; her talking about the pleasures of life, him scanning her body, becoming aroused with excitement, but also sizing her up, speculating strength and swiftness. He had never missed a target, but it wouldn’t kill him to make preparations, though the same could not be said for her. A void to be filled, avoid to not be killed.
Yes, his void. It all came down to that in the end, I suppose. It was his one defining characteristic, of which all the others came. The void that made him cold, or even that was incorrect, as he felt nothing, nothing at all but the emptiness inside him, like a big hole in the ground through which one, if one was to venture near enough, would be able to see the hellish abyss unleashing its drooling demons with their vile weaponry and murky eyes, one would see the great lake of fire, or, though essentially the same, one would see nothing at all, only a big and black field without any marks or life. His inner being was a charred and fanatical beast hell-bent on destruction and torture, and every so often, though often would be the better of the two words, the beast took over. The beast that had perfect night vision and thus operated favorably in the absence of unbearable light, that shines its unmasking heat on all that crawls beneath the subtle surface of normal mankind, or as normal as mankind can be, mind you. The void first presented itself when he was at the tender age of sixteen, and, ever since giving in to the void’s needs he has been doing…it. God, how he loves it. That he actually can feel, but only that, and only for a short while, until the fantasy simply fulfills him no longer and he needs to replenish his inner craving for human souls. And the same it was now. He could not wait to consume her, to fill his void, however temporary, with her supple flesh, and beastly darkness hardened his appraising eyes.
She seemed more aware now of his continuing silence and her volume dropped a bit, and her eyes began at last to search the room for some symbol of normality, but in the barren room only barely lit by a lamp in the corner, next to his position on the couch, with the curtains drawn, there was no such thing to be found, and suddenly, and surely, she became frightened. She wanted to slap her well proportioned forehead and gauge her stupidity for coming over here without mentioning it to anyone, for the pure reason of not having met anyone to tell it to in the short amount of time that had passed since he had noticed and responded to her advert. It dawned upon her that he had yet to smile a smile more than polite ones –no genuine laughter had escaped his periodically shivering lips, that were almost scarlet red. For a brief moment she wondered whether he was wearing lipstick but concluded that would be ridiculous. She fell silent.
Silence can say a lot more than words and in that seemingly hour of a moment that she looked at him, something of an instinctual feeling came over her, it was a gut feeling, telling her to “get out”. But get out of what? She was at a loss. He had not cloaked his pathways well if he was thinking of raping her; to be sure, her email account contained his messages and for the police cracking her mail would be a walk in the park. But then she got goose bumps over her deliciously smooth arms, and a bright red appeared out of place amidst the light brownness of her cheekbones, that were protruding noticeably from under her eyes. Why would the police crack my account? Could I not show them myself? And the absence of a reassuring answer to her own question was quite dreadful, and she moved away from him on the couch, hoping he would not notice. But what did he notice? He was zoomed in on her eyes and his wouldn’t blink. Like a mechanical man he simply stared, waited, but on what she didn’t know nor was she particularly keen to find out. And then, realizing this was getting nowhere, she spoke to him, hoping to get through his lethargic apathy.
‘Say, why are you so silent?’ Fake laugh. A small one.
Nothingness. He only stared, and she noticed he had a hand inching away to the lamp standing adjacent. Then he spoke.
‘Silly girl, all alone in this cavern of my domain, of my dominion.’
She nearly jumped; his voice sounded so different than before, where was the slight accent, the kindness, indeed, the humanity? He sounded like he stared. As a robot, but of a special kind –a robot that was having loads of fun, playing not unlike a cat would with a mouse or a toy. And her fear crept upwards, and her hands clasped on her tightening crotch, and she held her legs pressed stiff together at the joints of the knees, and she glared at the robot-man, the beast-man, and she swore his eyes were filling up with a redness, almost, in a very literal form of burning eyes with a fiery look.
‘What in the name of Heaven are you?’ She said it almost stuttering, unsure of everything but most of all of him and her chances of getting out this house, that seemed incredibly dark all of a sudden, and she wished the curtains had not been drawn or that she had noticed them being drawn earlier.
And when she asked that, he could no longer contain his yearning beast, the demon from within, and in an instant, the man he never truly was vanished, only to be replaced presently with the void that filled him completely and was thus in a way his eternal essence. The beast started to drool and the insanity prohibited him almost of responding, but somehow the beast like to talk to its victims.
‘A serial killer’, it said, ‘that is what I am, and is it not wonderful how you have chanced to get into this little predicament –locked in all alone with a serial killer, mind you, the nastiest and most inhuman of all types of killers and the sort. Actually this would be an appropriate time to scream…’ And with that, it flicked off the light framed by the lamp standing next to him and utter darkness filled the apartment, gobbled it up like an enormous black mouth, rotten to the core. And the beast, seeing, with the night vision inherent to beasts, her well, moved about the room, touching this and moving that, growling here and sighing there. And the girl was very confused by this ballet of the macabre and twisted on her heels. It was rather like an unwanted dance. Unwanted by her, that is.
‘Tell me, what do you want?’ She gasped into the darkness, noticing only his cold and half-closed eyes that stared insanely focused on her. And when he would close them and shift positions, she could only look everywhere she could to find him, by the grace of the white in his eyeballs, and find scarce solace when she did. He kept moving and making sounds here and there and she desperately wanted to get to the door but was afraid to advance, content to swirl in a fixed place, and with an astonishing clarity remembered him locking the door and checking it carefully too. This is not his first time, she thought, and if only she knew just how right she was. He stepped closer, moved his eyelids together, appeared left of her, again a step closer, and repeated this. Something seemed to hold off his frontal assault to which she would have been defenseless, but she did not know what it was and thus could not exploit it. Had she known it was her lack of screaming, so different from all that had become houseguests before her, she would have kept silent forever. But when he was too close to bear it any longer, she exhaled precious oxygen violently and made a run to the locked door, hoping somehow to get through. And obviously she trapped herself even more by doing so, for now she leaned backwards against the door, and was enclosed by the opposing walls of the small hallway, but even worse were those scoffing eyes, creeping ever nearer. Indeed, he was already within striking distance, within arm’s length, and he touched her –it was a quick tickle of her leg, but it was enough to sent her thought processes haywire. She smelled his sweat now, and it filled her nostrils with a salted flavor. He closed his eyes. She could feel him somehow, feel him stepping forward, breathing hard, hard below too, and she was confident he was standing perhaps no more than a quarter of a foot from her face, and she sank to the stability of the floor, half in mind to roll up like a ball and eject fountains of tears. And in a flash, his eyes moved rapidly to her position on the floor.
And it was not that he hated her. Not at all. In his own way, he rather liked her. Nor was it that he hated all humans. Although he viewed the species as primordial apes, powerless against the whims of Nature and nations (germs and Germans), that was an altogether exaggerating word for it. Too harsh a description. It was just that she wasn’t terribly important to him, but then again, who was? No one…and thus no one was save and all were in great peril, for he did not, or could not particularly care who he would feed to his inner beast, who would be taken by it, who he would partake to fill his void for a while.

And then, at last but alas too late, she indeed began to scream, and rather loud too.