CHAPTER 1
Sunglasses at Night
November 2 6:00 P.M.
To look down Fromer Street, you wouldn't think much of it. It was a lower- to middle-class neighborhood with mostly cheap apartment buildings and modest places of business including, but not limited to, the corner shops and local bookstore. It wasn't the best district in Carta City, but by no means was it the worst, not by a mile.
It was 6:00 P.M. in the evening, November 2, and there was nothing special happening. It was not a holiday or local time of revilement and most of the Carta City residents, which occupied Fromer Street, were either already parked in front of their televisions, blank-faced, watching whatever was currently passing as prime time entertainment or they were just making their way home from work, briefcase or purse in hand or over the shoulder, juggling their door keys in one hand while trying to maintain their slender grip on the odd grocery bag from a local shop. The older of the residents were probably already in their beds along with the younger, of course, while the in between grabbed a moment either to themselves or with their significant other, just the same routine that had been acted out the day before, and was destined to be replayed the following day. However, in this tapestry of seeming normality existed an anomaly, for one thing was out of place by far further than anyone could have known. At 347 Fromer Street sat a small affordable duplex. The second floor was vacant and had been for around three and a half months, but an elderly couple, Beth and Robert Coleman, occupied the bottom floor. Normally, at this time of the evening, Beth and Robert would be watching Faith Revisited on channel 27, a talk show of sorts with a religious context that went off the air at 6:45 P.M., and just before the credits would have rolled, Beth and Robert thought of their bed, already being worn out from another day of doing very little.
Robert, at age 69, had been retired for seven years and Beth, who had never worked in her 62 years on earth, watched their kids grow and leave the house. Now, the older couple had nothing to do besides make light conversation and do crossword puzzles. However, today was different. There was no sweet elderly couple sitting on the floral print couch. There was no religious program on the television. In fact, the television wasn't even turned on. There were no open crossword books and no one was getting ready for bed. Why was it that Beth and Robert Coleman had deviated from their iron set routine so drastically? What was it that could have so altered their lives and the course of their evening in such a way? The answer was inside of a closet in the tightly locked and very vacant upstairs apartment in the shape of a sweet elderly couple propped against one another in the cramped confines of the small room, the very place where Beth and Robert Coleman had been placed 17 hours earlier, the bodies stiff now and bowels long since purged onto the closet's floor, seeping through the wood, gravity pulling the fluids toward the basement. Their wrinkled skin was cold and drained of moisture, the insects just beginning to find their way in following the slowly increasing scent radiating from the bodily fluids, which leaked through the floorboards into the downstairs apartment, trickling down the walls, leaving behind a distinct odor of decay and forgotten summers of rotting meat and burnt out freezers.
Past the first floor in the basement of 347 Fromer Street played the devil that had knocked ever so slightly on the Coleman's back door. The devil that had waited patiently for Beth to make her way to the door with awkward creeping steps made on top of bad hips with the aid of a wooden cane. The devil who had taken the breath away from both Robert and Beth before tucking them ever so neatly away in the upstairs closet. However, the Coleman's were simply in that devil's way, nothing more, but it was in the basement of 347 Fromer Street where that devil played out his true purpose, working on his first masterpiece.
The basement was dark, dingy, and dusty, long neglected. The room was still for the moment, the rhythmic sound of a leaking water pipe tapping a tune onto the seat of an old bicycle left behind by Jerry Morgan, the last resident of the upstairs apartment.
In the basement's center hung a young girl wearing only a matching set of underwear, a pink see through bra and thong with red piping. She was hung by her wrists, chains wrapped tightly around them and looped over a hook hung from the first floor girders above her. The girl's feet dangled cruelly an inch above the cement floor, her hands having long since turned a sickly shade of black and purple with the pain and dying circulation, the sensations fading from agony to burning, followed by no feeling at all. She had been hanging there practically naked for 14 hours fading in and out of consciousness. The young girl hung lifeless from her dead hands before once again stirring back to reality, although she hardly recognized it as being such. She slowly stirred awake and in the distant shadows of the basement through bloodshot eyes clouded with 14 hours of periodic tears she saw her torturer, she saw that devil as he stepped out into the soft light that covered the room from a lone hanging light bulb. The man, the devil, was dressed in black from head to heel. He had a leather coat on open at the front of his leather-clad legs, which tapered up to his waist where it grew tight around his torso, chest fastened with numerous buckles that shimmered silver, the clasps dotting his chest like crooked stitches in a sea of black, a jagged silver smile played out on treated animal hide. His skin was pale and somewhat transparent with the blue hue of veins being visible just beneath its surface. The devil's eyes were covered in small round goggles that were strapped tightly to his face by a cord that wrapped around his head, the cord hidden by the long wavy black hair that hung down around the man's face swaying side-to-side, as he stepped closer to her once again before turning to the table that sat just to the girl's left, putting a bare fair-skinned hand on a roll of black leather that sat on the table. Pushing it to one side, the bundle rolled across the table's top and in its center, tied by a single piece of string, sat a straight razor with a black handle and silver blade, which caught the soft light, just the same as his coat buckles did, black and silver, a stereotypical color scheme for the calm monster that pulled the string, freeing the razor from its prison.
The hanging girl's name was Tabitha Connelly viewed by some as a party girl, wild and unbound by any strict set of moral codes or self-respecting limitations, viewed by others as the best thing in the neighborhood since the invention of the bicycle and twice as fun to ride, and viewed by even others still as simply the neighborhood tramp. She looked a lot older than she indeed was. Tabitha was only 16, but passed easily for 20 and did so on numerous occasions. Her promiscuous way of dress only served to make her look even older, drawing even more attention to her, which indeed was her intent.
The man in front of her, that devil that played behind those simple round goggles, had come out of nowhere, stepping out of an alley as Tabitha walked home from just another desperate plea for attention in the form of a three-way sexual debacle with Jeffery and Frankie Doman, two brothers who lived a couple blocks away from her. The man had asked her if she had a...
