Bitter (Part 2)

If you’re just jumping in now you’ll need to go back and read the first part of the letter or this won’t make any sense .

Part 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/aekguj/bitter/

Sorry I’m having to break it up like this. Like I said at the end of my last post this guy just wrote so much I couldn’t upload it all at once. This is the last part of the letter my girlfriend got from Brian Mills, the convicted serial killer.

+++

One show led into the next and the next. Men groped Adelaide and she bought them drinks for it. She continued to flirt and laugh even as she felt the death all around her. She wouldn’t tell me his name. It didn’t matter to her. All that mattered was the attention, no matter what price was paid.

More dead men. One in Cincinnati, another in Columbus. More photos on the website. More blank eyes and naked skin. They enraged me. I needed something. I needed to know.

I dreamt of ropes and duct tape. I dreamt of Adelaide. The killer watched me through the windows of my car, the haze of stale smoke clinging to the glass.

You’re doing it wrong! I screamed. He only laughed.

I punched Benjamin Grey in Washington, DC. I didn’t know then that he had been chosen.

Bitter Waters was taking the stage. I did not feel what I used to feel. Where once the music had filled me it now only echoed in all the hollow places inside of me, reminding me that there was something twisting in my guts that I did not know how to satisfy. Her voice was no longer the voice of God. But I couldn’t stop. Her music wove around the dead men, wove around the longing and the dreams in a tangled discordance. I had to find him.

Benjamin stood next to me, drinking piss yellow beer out of a plastic cup. He called up to Adelaide.

“Hey baby, you the singer?”

She was tuning her guitar, only half-listening, but she still smiled for him.

“I am.”

He grabbed himself through his pants. I don’t know if she saw, but I did.

“I think I got a better use for that mouth than singing.”

I swung before she could say a word. She would have whored herself for him, I knew. She would bat her lashes and buy him a drink and laugh that infuriating laugh of hers and I couldn’t stand it one more god damn time. She was supposed to be better, supposed to be stronger, but instead she was just like every other slut I had ever met and I wasn’t going to let it play out right in front of my face again.

Benjamin stumbled back against the crowd.

“Brian, what the fuck?!” She jumped from the stage, guitar abandoned, pushing herself between us as Benjamin made a move toward me. Someone shouted for security.

There was a firm grip on my shoulder and then I was being guided through the crowd by a burly man in a shirt printed with the bar’s logo. Behind me I could hear Benjamin protesting.

“No man, I didn’t want to start any shit. I just want to watch the show.”

Outside it was dry and warm. Benjamin’s eye was beginning to swell. The burly man released his grip on my shoulder as Adelaide spoke to another security guard.

“Please don’t call the cops. It was just an overreaction. This dude didn’t do anything wrong.” She put her hand on Benjamin’s forearm. Her bandana was white.

I lit a cigarette as they spoke. The sudden temptation to grind it out on the exposed wing of the Victory on her chest was strong. I already knew there would be no words of defense for me. I settled for flicking the butt at her feet. She followed its path with her eyes, then looked up at me. We shared a vice now, but nothing else.

Security didn’t call the police. They let Benjamin back in. I felt Adelaide’s eyes on my back as I walked away.

The next night was the end. The crowd pressed against me—an undulating, sticky mass—and lit my every nerve on fire. My knees threatened to buckle beneath me.

I had dreamed of Adelaide again the night before. In the logic of the dream I could see inside of her. She was full of everything that I hated: the secrets, the fear, the drugs. All a swirling mass of grey filth. Before there had been a light inside, beneath the ugliness, but now it was gone.

Where is it? I asked her. I plunged my hands into the greyness, trying to move it aside, trying to expose the light. She laughed at me.

You’re doing it all wrong.

I turned and the killer was there, watching us. He was closer than he had ever been. I could see his white eyes through the window. His breath fogged the glass.

You’re doing it all wrong, he said again.

He forced his fingers through the gap at the top of the window. They were long and mottled. Too many joints, the flesh too soft. It was slipping, like the skin of the man with the long black hair had slipped after days in the mud.

This isn’t about me, I told him. He laughed and Adelaide laughed and the rage I felt was so great that I thought I would fly apart. I struck the glass, trying to crush his fingers, but they grabbed me instead. They were cold against the back of my hand.

I opened my eyes and I was in the crowd again, the memory of the dream fading. Adelaide was on stage, staring at me. There was no smile there, no laughter. She turned to her bandmates. I heard her over the din:

“I’ll be right back.”

And then she climbed down off the stage and into the crowd. Some people tried to reach out to her, to hold onto her, but she pushed past them with closed fists and elbows. She grabbed my arm.

“Come on.”

I didn’t resist as she dragged me behind her through the throng. She pulled me out a side door and into the parking lot. Suddenly we were alone, the shouting of the crowd now only an echo, replaced by the sound of wind and distant traffic.

She let go of my arm, and it was only then I realized how hard her grip had been.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” She asked. It was not rage in her voice, or fear. It was something else. Something cold.

“I wanted to see you play.”

“Fuck you. Do you have any idea how close you came to ruining everything last night?”

The fire in my chest made my hands shake. “I wasn’t about to let him talk to you like that --”

“Why do you even care?”

“Because I do love you.” The words came out hollow, but surely that had to be it. It had to be that I loved her. What else could make me want her so much? What else could be make me hate her so much?

“You can’t love me. You have no idea who I am. Just because you follow me around, watch me on stage --”

“You would have bought him a drink.”

She stopped.

“What?”

“The guy last night. You would have bought him a drink and acted like a slut to reward him for waving his dick at you. While I...” I trailed off. I couldn’t find the words.

Adelaide laughed once, devoid of humor. She stepped closer to me.

“Then why don’t you just go inside and tell the bar you’re getting a drink on me? You can have it. If that’s all you fucking wanted, if that’s what all this has been about --”

I hit her. She landed hard on the ground.

“That is not what this is about!” I tried to keep my voice calm, but I was shaking so hard I could barely catch my breath. Adelaide’s lip was split, dribbling blood down her chin.

“This is about the killer,” I said.

“You’re a fucking psycho.”

I grabbed a fistful of her hair. It was softer than I had dreamed. I hauled her upright with it as she clutched at my arm. I hit her again and didn’t let her fall.

“Who is he, Adelaide?”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

I yanked her head back so I could look her in the eye. The skin over her cheekbone had parted under the force of the last blow. Her blood ran across my knuckles. It felt good.

“I need to find him. I need to ask him what it feels like...” A thought formed in my mind, dark and slithering. It made the desire in my chest twist and flare with anticipation. The answers I had been looking for were right at my fingertips.

“I could just kill you here and find out for myself.”

There was no one else in the parking lot. There was no one to stop me. But Adelaide only smiled at me, her bared teeth slick with blood.

“You don’t have the fucking guts.”

I dropped her. The motion was sudden. She didn’t have the strength to keep her feet. I stepped around her and back toward the door. Behind me I heard her spit onto the concrete. I imagined her wiping her mouth with the bandana on her wrist. I didn’t wonder what color it had been. It didn’t matter. It was red now. The low noise she made faded into the wind. It sounded like laughter.

No one stopped me as I re-entered the venue. Bitter Waters was not playing. I got the drink Adelaide had promised me. Then another, and another. When I went back out to the parking lot she was gone.

I drove home that night, stopping at a liquor store before it closed. The whiskey bottle was almost half empty by the time I stumbled into my apartment. The place smelled stale, the dishes in the sink fuzzed over with patches of mold. How many days had I been gone?

I paced and drank. There was a restless buzzing inside of me. My hands shook with it. I couldn’t get the thoughts straight in my head. They raced in spirals one over another over another in a dizzying whirl. How did it feel? How good did it feel?

There was still blood across my knuckles. I ran a finger over the dry brown spatters and they flaked under my touch. My head spun.

This isn’t about me. This isn’t about her.

I was suddenly in my bed. Adelaide was with me. She was crying, her hands bound to the bed posts with lengths of duct tape. I knelt over her.

The killer was a shadow, his white eyes glowing in the darkness. Nothing separated us now.

Why don’t you do it right?

There was a knife in my hand.

Do it right.

I did.

I plunged the knife in through her tattoo. Her sternum gave way under the force, and the air left her in a silent shriek. Blood flowed out over my hand. I pulled back, my grip slipping on the wooden handle, and stabbed again and again. I wanted to plunge my hands inside and find the perfection. I knew this was how I could do it, how I could do it right. No more dream logic, only the reality of the hot slick blood coating my arms. I slashed at her shoulders, at her throat. I could turn her into the Victory, make her everything she was supposed to be. Make her mine.

How does it feel? How good does it feel? The killer asked me. I couldn’t answer. Nothing had ever felt so good. Not to anyone. Beneath me Adelaide gurgled, blood running from her mouth.

It’s like sex, but better, she choked. She bared her blood-slick teeth in a smile. A last breath escaped her and I took it, my mouth clamped over hers. The last bit of everything that she was. When we parted she was still.

I sat back and breathed. The peace was instant and deep. Her blood was cooling on my skin like warm rain in the summer, the taste sweet on my lips. The killer was gone, replaced by silence. There was only me and the perfect thing in my bed that had been Adelaide.

Then someone was knocking on my door. My head swam with whiskey and the liquid memory of crimson. Sunlight speared through the windows in my room, blinding me.

I sat and the room spun. My fingers reached out across the bed for purchase, my mind following them with thoughts of tacky blood and cold flesh, but there was only cloth. Only a dream.

I stood unsteadily. My head pounded in time with the knocking. I stumbled out through the kitchen, toward the front door.

“What the fuck do you want?” I rasped, pulling it open.

Two men stood in the doorway, gleaming badges on their belts.

“Brian Mills?”

“Yes?” Police. My brain made the connection as I gave my answer.

One of them was somehow behind me then, grabbing my arms, pushing me against the wall.

“You’re under arrest for the murder of Benjamin Grey.” The handcuffs clicked into place. “You have the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you...”

I twisted and vomited down the leg of his nice, clean suit.

In the interrogation room, I kept my eyes down. The fluorescent lights hurt my head.

“You smoke, Brian?” The detective asked me.

“Sometimes,” I answered.

“You can smoke in here, if you’d like.”

The taste in my mouth was sour, the sweetness of the dream long since faded.

“No thanks.”

“Did you hate Benjamin Grey?” I raised my eyes to him. He was clad in sweats now, a manila folder in his grasp.

“I don’t know who that is.” At the time, it was true. I didn’t.

“Maybe this will jog your memory.”

He opened the manila folder and slid a photograph across the table to me. It was a man, naked and bound with duct tape, his mouth gaping open for one last desperate taste of air. His tongue protruded, coated in the filth of the ground. His eye was swollen shut. I pushed the photograph away. It was like all the others, except all the others didn’t have the mark of my fist in their flesh.

“So if you didn’t hate him, why did you punch him?”

“Because I was angry.” I kept my voice calm. This was all a mistake. If I just told the truth they would understand. I hadn’t done anything wrong.

The detective lifted the photograph again, gazed at it with an appraising eye.

“Very angry, I’d say.”

“I didn’t do that to him.” I didn’t mention the other men, didn’t mention the killer.

“Okay.” He shrugged, sliding the page back into his manila folder. “You ever get angry at anyone else?”

I didn’t answer.

“You ever get angry at Adelaide?”

My hands were cuffed to the table. Her blood, her real blood, was still smeared across my knuckles. A welt was rising where her teeth had broken the skin.

“I don’t know.”

“But you do know that you hit her, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So maybe you weren’t mad. Maybe you hit her because you were afraid.”

I looked up and met his eyes. They were like hers. Smug, superior. Laughing at some joke she thought I was too stupid to understand.

“Afraid of what, exactly?” The calm was slipping from me.

“That she would tell someone what you had done.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“Do you think she’s stupid?”

I answered before I could stop myself: “Yes.”

“So maybe you wouldn’t think she would notice. Maybe you didn’t think we would notice.”

The calm broke.

“Notice what?!” I shouted.

“That men have died only at shows—you’ve—attended.”

His words were punctuated by the slap of paper on the table. Glossy photo paper. Eleven dead men. Black hair, shaved head, broad shoulders, fat and thin, cord burns and duct tape, pale skin and...the Virgin Mary. I grabbed that one, flung it back at him.

“I wasn’t at the show with him! I started going after he was killed.”

“And why is that?”

I knew then that I had to come clean. I didn't care if it made me look bad, if it made me sound like a freak. I hadn’t killed them.

“I saw his tattoo," I said. "It’s album art for Crimson Shrine, the band that Adelaide is touring with. He was murdered near one of their shows and so was the first man, and I just wanted to find who did it!”

The detective raised an eyebrow at me. I had said something he hadn’t expected to hear.

“So you were at all these shows because you were looking for whoever had killed these men?”

“Yes.”

“And you knew to go to these shows because of this man’s tattoo?”

“Yes.”

He nodded, looking down at the picture again. He sighed through his teeth.

“Right, okay. So, just clarify this last bit for me, how did you know where the first two victims were killed? And how did you manage to see this tattoo on David Stills’ back at a concert where he was fully clothed and which you supposedly did not attend?”

He thought he had me. I was too stupid to realize he was right.

“There’s this website --”

He cut me off with an absent-minded wave.

“You know what? We’ll clear up the details on that in a bit. You ever smoke in your car, Brian?”

I fumbled. “What? Yeah, sure, sometimes I do.”

“You ever get that thing where you chuck the butt out the window, but then it just blows back in?”

“No. What does this have to do with --”

He cut me off again. “I actually think you have.”

He paused, maybe waiting for me to say something. But I had nothing to say. I didn't even know what was happening.

“See, we found a cigarette butt in the back seat of Benjamin Grey’s car. But he didn’t smoke. Now, could be it’s just from some buddy of his, but I don’t think so. I think whoever drove Benjamin’s car back into town after they bashed his head in and choked him to death had a smoke and threw the butt out the window and just didn't realize that it blew right back in.”

He smiled, wide and empty, smug eyes locked on mine.

“You think the DNA on that cigarette is gonna match what you spewed up on my clothes this morning?”

I don’t suppose I need to tell you that it did. And I don’t suppose I need to tell you that they never found the website. What they did find, however, was the paracord bracelet.

It was in the glove box of my car, nestled in a bed of unpaid parking tickets and fast food napkins. It had been wound and unwound many times, each time adding a few more hairs, a few more traces of skin. Eleven DNA samples from eleven murder victims. A perfect and portable trophy. They had never found the murder weapon at any of the scenes. Now they knew why. They didn’t need me to provide an explanation for it. Just as well, since I didn’t have one. At least not one that they would have believed. I was framed! is hardly an original defense.

And no, I’m not crazy, despite the bullshit my lawyer tried to sell everyone. I couldn’t confess to the murders, he said, couldn’t feel remorse for them because I didn’t remember committing them. The shame I felt for my homosexuality had broken my psyche, driving me to kill those men without even realizing I had done it. I projected onto Adelaide, and the attention they gave her was my trigger. Jealousy and shame and a raging homoerotic erection had obliterated my brain. Not guilty by reason of insanity. I needed help, not jail time. Poor me.

Except I’m not fucking gay, and I am not fucking crazy. But I let him say what he thought he needed to say, because I knew it was only a matter of time. I knew that another body would drop, another washed-up metalhead shit would turn up with his pathetic life choked out and then they would have to let me go free. It had to happen. Serial killers don’t just stop. They die or they get caught or they go dormant for a time, but they never truly stop. They can’t.

Days and then weeks and then months passed. No more bodies. No more men disappearing from shows. It had stopped. And the only logical conclusion for a jury was that it had stopped because I had been caught. Because it was me.

And the rest is not really history. The rest is merely waiting.

Bitter Waters is on their farewell tour now, or so Gary tells me.

“Band’s calling it quits. No hard feelings though, according to the tabloids. Six years in the big leagues and they’re all rich enough to retire. Think we all know who they oughta be thanking for that.”

He winked at me. He didn’t see the way my nails bit into my palm, echoes of the knife in a long-past dream.

“You should go see them, Gary, before they finish up. It’ll change your life.”

He laughed so hard at that he almost choked. I think that would have been entertaining.

Gary likes to talk to me about Adelaide. He always has. I think it makes him feel close to me, like he thinks he’s doing a me a favor. Giving me isolated tastes of the woman I had been so obsessed with, bringing me small moments of peace and happiness. I let him believe this.

A month after my conviction he told me that she had checked herself into rehab. She had attempted suicide just before, her broad-shouldered drummer kicking down the hotel bathroom door before she could shoot a massive dose of heroin into her vein. Newspapers called her my would-be twelfth victim. They published portions of the note she had planned to leave behind:

It’s my fault those men died. He killed them because of me. Why did he have to choose me?

Why did I choose her? The question seems important, more so now than ever. But I still can’t find an answer.

Six years on now and she hasn’t attempted again. She’s still clean. Knowing what I know now, it’s not particularly surprising. I don’t expect it’s very difficult to kick a drug habit you never had in the first place.

Sometimes, one vice can even cover another.

I got her gift today.

Gary passed it to me with a pack of cigarettes. A black bandana, intricately tied into a bracelet. It was just like the kind she used to wear. But it was too heavy, too rigid to just be cloth. There was something inside. I should have known before today, but I didn’t. I was stupid. I spent too much time thinking only of blood. I spent six years fantasizing about a dream, and never seeing reality. Never seeing the dead men right next to her. Never seeing the arc of my cigarette before it landed at her feet.

I unwrapped the bandana. There was a paracord bracelet inside.

It had always been about me, and it had always been about her.

Serial killers can’t just stop. But some of them try. And it’s always easier if someone else takes the blame.

I was chosen because I was like the rest of them, wasn’t I? I was chosen because I chose her. And yet I was different too. She saw something in me, something alien and sick. Something like what is in her. That’s why I didn’t die on a roadside six years ago, and why I will never get out of this cell alive. But it doesn’t matter now. I waited--even after the sentencing, even after all these years--because at least I knew that serial killers can’t just stop. There always has to be another death, another body. And despite all the special treatment I was still chosen.

So I’ll give you your fucking body, Adelaide. The real victim number twelve. There are crossbars high enough on the cell that I can do what you want. Better this way than to let them stick a needle in my arm.

Someday you’ll slip up. Someday they’ll catch you, this note will make sure of that. When they do, I hope they fucking kill you.

God be at your table,

Brian

+++

And that’s it.

Brian Mills killed himself in prison 2 years ago. I don’t think what I posted here was just any letter. I think it was his suicide note.

But I still don’t understand any of this. I mean the guy was nuts, right? Totally fucking nuts. The letter itself makes that pretty goddamn clear. Even his own lawyer said he was nuts. And he was a killer. They had all that evidence against him. I saw it online. I mean they were going to fucking execute him for killing all those dudes. They can’t just do that willy nilly if they don’t have proof.

Except after reading this I’m not even sure anymore. I mean they mess up sometimes don’t they? I read about shit like that too while I was looking into this. Fuck, there was that dude in West Memphis the state was gonna kill for murdering a bunch of kids and it turned out he didn’t do it.

So what if Brian Mills was telling the truth? What if he didn’t kill anybody? This letter sure as shit makes it sound like he didn’t. But it just raises more goddamn questions than I can come up with answers for.

Like who the fuck posted all that shit online and why couldn’t they find it later? Did schecter or whatever delete it when he saw somebody got arrested? Or like how can some crazy bitch manage to frame somebody like that? Why didn’t anybody find this letter when Brian Mills offed himself? Why did it show up at our house 2 fucking years later?

And why did my girlfriend hide it from me?

And why did she look so goddamn nervous when she read it?

Why won’t she ever talk about her band?

And why...why does the huge tattoo of roses across her chest look so much like it’s covering something else up?

Submitted January 11, 2019 at 08:56PM by DA_Williams http://bit.ly/2SKxnqK