First published in the Hooghly Review, Issue 1, April 2023
The first thing John did was call 911 after he regained consciousness. The second was to dress up his naked wife lying in bed, still unconscious but breathing steadily. There was a very thin smoke inside his room, and from the smell of it, it was not from fire. The room was locked from the outside, so he could only wait for the police to arrive.
The only other person in the house was his mother, who had suffered a spinal injury that made her wheelchair-bound and paralyzed waist down. All John wished for was that she would be safe; sleeping in her room.
He tried breaking the door but couldn’t, so he opened the windows to let the fresh air in. The little water in the flower vase her wife kept on the windowpane was smelling stale when he poured it over her face in an attempt to make her conscious, which failed miserably.
When the police arrived and opened his door, the paramedics ran in, flashed lights in his eyes, and checked his blood pressure. Another team carried his wife on a stretcher to the ambulance.
The living room was a mess. The TV, the central table piece, and all the stupid paintings made by his wife were missing. And everything else was broken. How the hell didn’t I hear a thing.
At thirty-six, John was working two shifts, one at a grocery store and another at a filling station. He was still paying the EMI’s for the TV, and now it was gone. With the number of things missing and broken, he was now cursing himself. John’s life was already miserable—his rent was overdue, his savings were gone when his mother got ill and he was accumulating debt for her treatment, his wife constantly fought with him, his only shoe had had a withered sole—and now this.
And then, when he entered the kitchen, his mother’s wheelchair was upside down. And she lay near the open fridge. The medics declared her dead.
John was tormented. He was miserable, out of money, and in debt. He had signed a deal with a doctor he met accidentally at the hospital parking, who claimed an alternate treatment can help with his mother’s illness but now she was dead—now of all times when he thought she would be alright, up and walking within a month. The doctor had visited their house only once, for a primary general check-up and now John had to pay the EMI for the promised treatment for the next three months.
Police declared it robbery and homicide. Thirty-five items were missing, and mother strangulated to death using a shoelace that still hung around her neck.
This was the sixth incident in less than a year. Robbery and murder with a shoelace. A serial killer. The Shoelace Killer.
—
The first time James was breathless was during his birth. He was born on the flight; prematurely and underweight. The emergency medics who were airlifting his mother were not trained to deliver babies. They improvised, and by the time he landed on the roof of the hospital, he was already short on oxygen.
His mother died later that day, and he had no recollection of how she looked, for nobody had her picture. They were lost in the building collapse from where the medics picked her up as the only survivor of her family. So, he never got to know his dad either.
The second time he got breathless, he was strangulating a thirty-year-old man with shoelaces. It was a hard battle and his first time. He was seventeen. But now, when he looks at it, it was just inexperience that made him breathless. Ten years and twenty-two murders—6 shoelace strangulations, 5 injected poisonings, 8 baseball-head-blows, and 3 pillow strangulations—later, he knows how easy it is. He is a 4-in-1 serial killer.
He is a highly-paid and well-respected person in his field of work. The best there is. His work requires him to kill a person and leave evidence of the murder. Escaping is his skill, not a job requirement, and strangulation is his personal choice. More than killing, what pays more is the evidence of the killing. And as honest as he is, he never forges fake evidence or directs the murder at someone else, or frames some innocent person as the killer.
He frames himself for the murders. But the murders he does are not for himself.
—
The first time John met James was at the hospital when he took his mother for a routine check-up. He offered to help him put her in the wheelchair from the taxi.
‘I can help you with her,’ James told him.
‘Thank you so much; I think I can manage now,’ John replied.
‘I mean forever, not just now. Once you are ready, you can call me. There is an alternate treatment for her, I can visit your house coming Tuesday’ He took an envelope from his white apron put it on the lap of his mother, and took the taxi in which John had come.
When John opened the envelope, there was a black visiting card with golden letters engraved in it. On one side was written the phone number, and on the other were the words in bold-italics;
Dr. James
αμαρτοφάγος
amartofágos
—
The next day John bought a new pair of shoes.
