Conscience and no conscience.
In the end, the human side of him won out, and he had been unable to kill the infant.
Only then he hadn’t known what to do with it. Should he take it someplace and drop it off where someone was sure to find it? The good side of him wanted to do that, but then he wasn't sure if that was fair to the baby.
Would it be angry growing up without a mother? Would it be angry knowing its mother had been murdered? What if it was so angry that it decided to try and find him? He couldn’t take that risk.
So, he’d just left the baby there and run away.
Perhaps that made him a coward? He wasn't too sure. Nor did he particularly care.
He liked killing people. He didn’t want anything to interfere with that. And leaving the baby in the basket was still close enough to theRock-a-bye Babyrhyme to satisfy his needs. He still would have liked to do it properly. A teeny part of him wasn't sure if it counted if he hadn’t done it right. Counted toward what, he wasn't sure of that either.
Whatever.
It was over and done with now, time to move on.
He was excited about searching for his next victim. He was beginning to enjoy the feeling that killing gave him more and more, and he kept craving his next fix. He couldn’t bear to wait much longer before he took his next life.
But he still had to be careful. He was making an effort to try to keep a better grip on his real life, the one outside his new little hobby. He didn’t want anyone to figure out what he had been doing. And more importantly, he didn’t want anyone to stop him from doing it.
His other life was going well too. He thought he might be happy in it. It was hard to tell because happiness confused him. It felt weird. Kind of like a rollercoaster. Your stomach did a crazy dance inside you as you whooshed up and down, it felt odd but not unpleasant, and you kind of liked it. That was how his real-life made him feel. He wanted to keep hold of that feeling so he didn’t go completely black and shriveled up inside.
Maybe there was a way to keep the two separate?
To be able to keep the people in his life he cared about, his job, his home, and at the same time to feed his nursery rhyme cravings.
If he was going to do that, he would have to keep a better grip on reality. He couldn’t afford to keep walking around in this hazy fog. If he did, then he was going to mess up somehow. And messing up would send his life crashing down around him.
He paused outside a house.
Squinted.
Was that her? She was with another woman. They were standing by a car with boxes in their arms.
Immediately it came to him.
A-tisket a-tasket
A green and yellow basket
I wrote a letter to my love
And on the way I dropped it,
I dropped it, I dropped it,
And on the way I dropped it.
A little boy he picked it up
And put it in his pocket
He knew what that meant.
It meant that one or both women were meant to die at his hand.
But how would he know if it were one or both?