Meg felt beads of sweat forming on her forehead from her intense concentration. Her energies were completely inside Williams now, searching for a spark of humanity, but only finding burning black shards of hate. Wherever she turned inside his heart, there was nothing but loathsomeness. She tried repeatedly to toss her white blanket of warmth around the blackness, but it did nothing accept burn.
She prayed for strength and forced herself to dive deeper, knowing her family was pinning their hopes on her frail gift, but it was like diving into death looking for life. She felt herself getting pulled further into the dark demon’s abyss, but she couldn’t stop. So unfamiliar, so ill-equipped was she at what she’d attempted to do, she hadn’t thought to leave herself enough strength to climb back out. It was too late now.
Williams’ sick thoughts spun frantically.
She saw everything—unable to close her emotional eyes to the onslaught of his sick views.
***
A scrawny, black-haired boy giggled excitedly as he broke open the eggs one at a time so he could cruelly dissect what would have been baby birds.
The same boy, a teen now, stood over an orange little ball of fluff, a glint of evil in the same beady eyes, as he stepped on the kitten’s neck. He felt a shiver of exhilaration at the sound of the tiny bones cracking. In his hands were his mother’s good knives. He didn’t even wait for the heartbeat to stop before he dug into his chest to see the warm organs.
Meg wanted to vomit.
She felt strapped down, eyes tapped wide open, forced to witness the atrocities of the demonic soul from the time he first acted on his vile impulses.
The was no sanctity of life to him.
There was nothing precious or beautiful to be held sacred.
There was only his psychotic need to cause pain, thinly disguised to the outside world as his quest for scientific advancement.
She was subjected to the start of his sadistic behavior; his psychopathic spiral escalated over time. After the baby birds and the kitten, he just needed bigger and more interesting victims to abuse. His sick mind moved on to the neighbor’s dog, which he buried alive and timed how long he heard it struggle. Then countless more dogs and cats were laid to depraved waste through torture, amputation and dissection.
Meg’s mind tried to hold Maze—crying tears of angry vengeance for all the precious creatures this born psychopathic monster didn’t just kill. Then his emotional memories fast-forwarded, following some strange autobiographical timeline she was forced to experience, to when Williams was in medical school, working on human cadavers and feeling utterly unsatisfied in their already dead, frozen tissue.
On the surface, he worked to take care of his appearance. Though still slender, Kenneth Williams worked out, developing his physique. His intellect astound his professors at the Ivy League university and he was thought to be a high valuable asset to the scientific community, an up-and-comer the society’s wealthy introduced their daughters to in hopes of a good match.
All the while, Kenneth was hungry for death. He would travel far from his home, seeking vulnerable human souls to deceive into trusting him. Once it was a hitchhiker, another time he befriended a lonesome divorcee, then there was the homeless preteen. He wasn’t picky about his victims, except that they now had to be human. Any gender, age, condition would do. The bastard got off on it.
Oh, my dear God. Williams’ soul was so sick, Meg thought, terrified she was infused by his demonic essence, but there was nothing she could do. She was too far lost in his macabre mind. It was a labyrinth of violence.
So traumatized was she by what she was subjected to, she couldn’t even breathe. The longer she was exposed to his sick world, the deeper she sank into him. She didn’t know how long she was exposed, but it was beginning not to matter.
Meg knew what was happening each moment she was trapped.
Every passing heartbeat, there was less of her and her own memories and thoughts. As their heartbeats began to synchronize, she was losing herself inside the monster.
She saw the duplicity in Kenneth’s eyes when he asked Charlotte to marry him. She saw how he treasured her more as a political pawn in his game. His version of love was sick, though he did love her. The very few nights he allowed her into his bed miraculously created a child. At first he didn’t believe the child was his, so sure Charlotte had sought another’s comfort as he was always so busy building his scientific career.
Moments after she was born, Williams performed a paternity test on June himself and couldn’t decide whether or not he was pleased to find she really was his daughter.
Becoming a father didn’t change Kenneth’s psychotic thirst, just redirected it. He continued his double life, killing “nobodies” on the side and coming home to lightly kiss his Charlotte on the cheek even as she held the baby.