The Hunter Inside (2 page)

He picked himself and the
envelope up. There was no use in wondering and fearing its contents, he knew he
had to open it.
Words can’t hurt me
, he thought.
Sticks and stones
may break my bones…

He tore open the top of the envelope
and pulled out the single piece of paper. On it were ten words. Ten words that
sent shivers down his spine:

Your time will soon
be here. I will see you

He looked back at the
envelope and noticed what looked like a photograph inside. His perspiring,
shaking hands made it difficult to extract from the torn envelope, and when he
did it was facedown. As he held it in his hands he felt his heart rate increase
until it felt like a jackhammer inside his chest.

‘Calm down or you’ll give
yourself a heart-attack,’ he murmured to himself. But it was no good; his heart
was beating out of his chest, and would continue to do so in the face of the
threat.

He turned the photograph
over. What he saw made the blood run out of his face, his stomach turn, and the
world spin. He expected at any moment to feel a sharp pain in his chest, or a
tingling sensation running through his left arm as the stress caused his heart
to malfunction.

What Bill Arnold looked at
was a photograph of a man. But this man was dead. He had obviously been quite
savagely murdered.

He was, by Bill’s estimate,
about twenty-five years old. He couldn’t be sure about this because of
the massive injuries the man had suffered. His wrists were tied to bedposts and
he was naked.

There must be gallons of
blood
, he
thought. He could make out eight thick wounds, which he figured were probably
stab wounds, spread over the man’s chest and stomach. On top of this, there
were dozens of slash marks across his arms and legs and his throat had been cut
from ear to ear.

Bill looked away to try and
settle his wildly churning stomach. It was no use. The feeling of nausea was
mixed with a sense of fear that outweighed even the sense of pity and sadness
he had felt earlier in the evening.

He felt worse at witnessing
this photographed carnage than when he’d been informed of his father’s death.
That had been ten years ago, when he was forty years old, and now he felt a
heightened sense of mystery, like he had two years after the death of his
father, when his mother had walked out.

She had been a broken woman
when his father died. She changed from outgoing and confident, to a woman that
Bill barely recognized as his mother, always suspicious and very quiet. He
never really knew why she’d walked out and had never seen her again to ask her,
but the feeling he had now was the same as the feeling he’d had then. He felt
he was caught up in something bigger than was apparent to him. Like a deer
caught in the headlights of a car. About to be hit, but minus the knowledge of
by whom or why.

But at the age of fifty,
Bill Arnold felt too old to be playing games. Up until the arrival of the
photograph, he’d thought that if somebody had a gripe with him then he would
sooner they confronted him with it than try to scare him. Then they could seek,
and find, closure. But looking at the photograph and the terrible injuries that
the murdered man had suffered, he was no longer desirous of meeting the person
behind the correspondence – he had a fair idea what the closure would involve.

He turned the photograph
over again and looked closely at the man’s injuries. Arm’s length was as close
as his stomach would permit. There was so much damage. It seemed
incomprehensible that a human being was physically capable of doing such a
thing, but this was now very real for Bill Arnold, the trucker who had seen
enough horror in one day to last him a lifetime. He’d changed his mind. He
would
drive the half-kilometer to the liquor store. He’d also changed his mind about
the Budweiser.

He was going to need a
large bottle of bourbon.

*

He made his way around the house,
holding aside the tangled branches that grew at various points around the
perimeter of the garden. Somehow he had never gotten around to sorting out the
thick, thorny bush that made gaining access to the rear of the property
difficult to achieve. Now, as he entered the cramped and musty car hold
situated at the rear of the house and slipped behind the wheel of his old Ford
he wondered why. He also wondered why the state of the garden was entering his
thoughts at a time when it should have been furthest from his mind.

He sat for a moment,
reflecting on the note and the photograph, and wondering what to do. If he went
to the police they might think he had committed the murder. He had no alibi and
he also had the photo, which linked him to the crime scene. He knew he would be
hauled in for questioning, and he didn’t trust the police.

But who is this mysterious
stalker? And why am I on his hit list?
he wondered. He was unable to
speculate on who it might be. He therefore abandoned at an early stage trying
to work out why he was a target. He decided to get the beer
and
the
whiskey, knowing it was the only chance he had of forgetting this sick and
twisted killer.

The car’s engine sputtered
into life after a couple of attempts. He pulled out of the car hold and drove
down the drive slowly, waiting until he reached the blacktop outside before
picking up speed and beginning his mission.

It was now 9:30 PM and the
temperature was not much above freezing. He drove carefully, fearing invisible
patches of black ice. When he reached the store he hurried inside and grabbed a
crate of Bud that was nearly as chilled as he was, before going to the counter.

‘Give me the largest bottle
of the cheapest whiskey you’ve got,’ he said to the young girl behind the
counter, checking her out as she turned away with a look on her face that
suggested she thought he might be an alcoholic.

He wondered how much else
was going to go wrong for him today.

He left the store, pausing
only to glance at the front pages of the evening newspaper to see if there was
anything regarding the murder scene that he had viewed so recently. There was
no reference to it on the front page. He knew that this was the only page fit
to report such an abhorrent scene, and while he was relieved at the realization
that this could mean it had not happened locally, he also considered the
possibility that the body had not yet been discovered. He climbed back into the
car, depositing his purchases on the rear seat before starting the engine and
pulling out of the parking lot.

Upon his arrival home, he
went inside – making sure he had double-locked the door – and turned on the TV.
He drank the first bottle of Bud very quickly.

He drank most nights when
he wasn’t driving the rig. It was the best way he could figure out to escape
the loneliness he felt. Lately it had also been the best way of forgetting the
threat of whoever was taunting him.

Tonight he needed that
little bit more.

His stress levels were
high, and he needed to bring them down.

On top of this was the
added factor of darkness outside. As a child he had been afraid of the dark. In
fact, he had been petrified of it. His parents would have to bribe him into his
bed at night and it would always take him hours to get to sleep. He would lay
and imagine that a monster was about to come flying out of the cupboard,
keeping himself awake by shivering with fear all night. Or he would be just
falling asleep and he would hear a noise or see a shadow go across the room.

There had been only two
occasions in his adult life when he’d felt this nervous about the dark. One was
when his father had been killed and the other was now. He felt susceptible in
the dark, as did every child and every adult if they would admit it, and that
was why he needed more tonight.

He added a large whiskey to
the two bottles of Bud he had already drunk, and turned the dimmer switch until
it became a brightener switch.

Bill Arnold sat for almost
two hours, trying not to think about the letter or the photograph, and
shoveling beer, whiskey, beer, whiskey down his throat one after the other.

He gave up with the TV
after he had drunk seven bottles of Bud and as many large whiskeys. It had not
had the desired effect of making him forget his troubles. The screen became as
dead to him as the old broken lamp that stood in the corner of the room and the
table upon which his liquor stood as he dropped the remote control and thought
again about whether he should go to the police. Putting himself in their shoes
made him reluctant to do so. He’d heard nothing on the TV news, both local and
national.

‘What if they haven’t found
this man and the photograph helps them to find him?’ he slurred to himself.
‘I’ve got no alibi and I must be the only one to have this photograph.’ He
could not go to the police. They would suspect him. He would have to face this
alone.

But there were things that
Bill Arnold didn’t know. He would not be the only one to receive this vile
photograph – there would be others. And he would not have to face this thing
alone.

Paul Wayans sat and stared out of the
window of his Stamford residence that overlooked the Long Island Sound. A few
colorful sails bobbed up and down on the calm water, a gentle breeze sweeping
across the surface, wispy white clouds drifting slowly across the sky.

Despite the picturesque
panoramic that opened out in front of him, he was gripped by a feeling of
sadness and uneasiness that he had never before experienced in his thirty-four
years. Not even when his wife Marcie had been killed five years previously,
after getting caught up in a bank robbery, had he felt as alone as he did at
that precise moment. The feeling became unshakable, coursing through his veins
– an invisible assailant.

‘It’s just nonsense,’ he
said to himself, and was shocked by the reverberation of his voice around the
walls of his luxurious and spacious two bedroomed house.

Maybe old Todd Mayhew was
right. Maybe he
was
cracking up under the strain. He could almost hear
and see them now, standing at the bar in Chee-Uz, discussing him. Gloria would
be polishing a glass, as she seemed to be perpetually doing, and Todd would be
hugging a beer and telling Gloria how Paul should put the robbery behind him
and get back to work.

His attempts at putting on
a brave face, he realized, were as easy to see through as glass. They could see
his loneliness and could probably sense the fear he was living with.

His shadow was something to
be feared lately, and his twitchiness had been reflected outside the Shop2Drop
on the previous Wednesday when he had almost dropped his groceries after Todd
Mayhew had shouted a lazy ‘hi’ to him across the car park.

Jeez Paul, you’ve got to
get over this paranoia
,
he thought to himself as he went into the kitchen.

He poured himself a cup of
coffee as his mind raced and his head ached, wondering who was behind the notes
containing spine-chilling messages that he had been receiving for the past six
months. The letters were always untidy, and he wondered if it were some kind of
a sick prank that somebody was playing on him. There were never any postal
marks, which meant they were hand-delivered, and they were always anonymous.
Despite what seemed like days of thinking about them, Paul could not come up
with one single suspect.

His daze meant that the
arrival of his cat, Bristow, scared him nearly half to death.

‘Wow, fella. You had me
worried there,’ he muttered, one hand scratching under the cat’s chin. ‘Any
idea who’s doing this, big guy?’

The cat’s status as his
closest companion had been cemented throughout his isolation. It was Marcie’s
legacy to him – a ginger ball with claws. But Bristow was more than that. He
seemed to sense Paul’s depression and attempted to comfort him, always around
to be petted and provide companionship. In his desperation to keep his wife’s
memory alive, he saw qualities in the cat he was sure had been handed down from
her.

The cat had a big heart,
and Marcie had the biggest heart in the world. It was beautiful, like his wife
– the most beautiful woman in the world.

Marcie was the most
selfless person he had ever known. She had put up with the hours he’d worked,
leaving the house at 3.30 AM and sometimes not returning until seven or eight
at night, and when the pressure had been on, she had taken it off.

She had been a tower, but
the tower was gone. The pressure he felt now was the pressure of loneliness,
heightened by the sense of fear that permeated his entire self. Bristow formed
the final link, a grip on the edge of the wilderness from which he tried to
hide.

But he still hadn’t learned
how to talk.

The cat’s dark eyes
examined him, and realizing that he wasn’t getting any food for the moment, he
jumped down to the floor went back to his early morning ritual of licking clean
his paws.

‘Oh, what a testing life
you…’ his train of thought was broken as he heard the mailbox being rattled and
looked out of the window just in time to see the back of the mailman’s
fluorescent jacket as he cycled away from the property. He was gripped again by
that same unknowing fear that had gripped him every day at that moment for what
seemed like an eternity. OK. So he was sure the mailman wasn’t delivering the letters,
but he also knew it was that time of the day when he had to see if whoever
was
delivering them had left another.