Murder Eyes

by

Jesse Hilson

Darren Riley of Chattanooga, Tennessee sat in the unspoken libidinal haze of the cavernous dining room at the Iroquois Hotel in Cooperstown. He sat with his two boys, Jake, 18, and Tommy, 11 and his fiancée Janice Sugarman at a table nearby the large double doors headed into the kitchen. They had just sat down to what would be the final dinner given by the hotel to the public before the entire building shut down and became an impenetrable fortress inhabited by the Hall of Famers arriving for the 2015 Hall of Fame Induction later in the week.

A superstitious voyeurism to the crowd at dinner tonight, who got a thrill out of sitting in the same chairs where the pro ball-players would be sitting in just a few days. One or two baseball celebrities were in the crowded dining room already, early arrivals, but they were ones who had figured out long ago that they wouldn’t be mobbed by frenzied fans.

“I wish we could hide out in here,” Tommy said. He wore a blazer (dinner was formal at the Iroquois) and an Atlanta Braves cap held down his mop of hair. “And creep around here at night …”

“They bring in dogs to sniff out trespassers, doofus,” Jake said.

“Is that true, Darren?” Janice asked. She had never been to Cooperstown before. A young man in a black waiter’s uniform leaned forward to pour ice water into each person’s water glass. Darren had made sure the four of them would be dining by themselves.

“Yeah, but that’s for bombs, I think. And drugs maybe?” Darren had to speak a little louder to be heard over the carpet of noise from the rest of the room.

“Why would there be a bomb?”

“Death threats.” Darren stroked her shoulder. “Crazy fans, who can’t let go of some World Series from ten years ago.”

Jake tapped his palm with his spoon. “Like football in Colombia. This goalie that lost the big game was executed in the street later.”

Darren looked at his older son. He would be going off to college in the fall, so it would just be Tommy home with Janice and him.

“Lord have mercy,” Janice said.

From out of the chaos a female form materialized over Darren’s shoulder. “Good evening. Can I take your drinks order?”

Tommy answered first. “Root beer.”

“Can I have a beer, dad?” Jake asked. Darren nodded, not looking up yet. Jake ordered a Budweiser and there was no checking of IDs.

Janice ordered a Pinot Noir.

“And for you, sir …”

He turned his head up, and finally looked at her with his third, fourth, and fifth eyes and could see her whole vasculature of blood busily glistening underneath her skin. With his two regular eyes he could see how the black and white cocktail waitress outfit highlighted her cheeks flushed from the heat of the bar downstairs. In his mind, she had been hustling drinks up and down the stairs all evening, and he peered into the momentum and subtle drama of her shift as it unfolded in time.

“I’ll have a Bud like my son Bud here.”

The brass pin on her compressed, full chest read AGNIESZKA. From Poland, he guessed.

He watched her scribbling into her tiny leather notebook and his sixth and seventh eyes, his murder eyes, watched those reddened capillaries of her cheeks greying as they emptied of all life, and her blond hair continuing to grow for several days after her future death (whenever that might be, eyes couldn’t tell) like his lawnmower’s rotors spinning for several seconds after it had been shut off, until drifting to a halt.

“I get your drinks order for you, okay?”

Once she left, Janice looked down at her lap and said, “Wow, she was a babe.” She looked up at Darren’s face with some worry and puzzlement that his extra eyes couldn’t quite penetrate. “Wasn’t she, Jake?”

“I’ve seen better,” Jake answered, watching Agnieszka moving away between tables.

“Not in person,” Tommy said.

“She had an accent, Darren,” Janice said. “Do you know what that accent was? She looks like a Sweden person or something.”

“Don’t know. I think they hire foreign exchange students during summer months.”

“Was that true before, when you came with Sara?”

“I don’t quite remember. Maybe.”

One or another of his eyes watched his sons shift with discomfort at the mention of their mother. Invisible to anybody else, even their stepmother. If she had been able to perceive the basic effects of her words she might think twice about how she used them. He considered punishing her body somehow but thought he would just settle for hurting her mind later when she wasn’t expecting it.

They had a lovely dinner.

Tommy’s routine at Diamond Dream Camp was pretty much set at that point, and when it came to sports he was self-reliant and focused. He woke up early, slapped himself in the face twice to wake up (not hard, more for a display of toughness to his brother and dad), and staggered to the breakfast nook. Janice gave him a bowl of oatmeal that she made in the kitchen of their cabin and some o.j. Not one for preparing big meals, especially in someone else’s kitchen. The camp took care of breakfasts and lunches at the mess hall, but the Rileys agreed they were a little wanting and Janice supplemented their diet with her own additions here and there, snacks really.

Darren and Tommy read the newspaper which was inferior to the daily paper in Chattanooga in many ways. Tommy disassembled the sports section, snickering at this or that new unfortunate wrinkle in some athlete’s career. He devoured ESPN with his dad at home. Jake was in his pajamas in front of the 64” TV suspended from the wall of the living room area, watching the Spanish language channel where a stunning female anchor rattled off the news in a rapid-fire stream of syllables.

“Wow, for a news lady she dresses like she’s in a nightclub,” Janice said, standing behind the couch where Jake had collapsed. “Don’t you think so? Darren?”

“It’s like the Spanish version of E! Entertainment TV,” Jake said. “It’s trashy. She’s trashy. That’s why I like it.”

“Jake!” Janice said. “Darren, your son is turning into a pig.”

“I’m on vacation, Janice,” Jake said.

“Your whole life is a vacation.”

“I’ve heard that before, Dad, many times. I have a job.”

Tommy lowered his paper like a 1950s dad in a screwball comedy. “Shyeah right. Walking around the floor at Dick’s, practicing your jump shot on the in-store hoop.”

“Do you need that much makeup and jewelry to read the news in Spain?” Janice asked.

She really wanted him to see, she was always asking him to look at things. He gave some of his eyes to the TV screen. Janice was right, the anchor was thin and looked like she was out for a night of cocaine and dancing in Barcelona. In a glittery black sleeveless shirt and slim pin-stripe pants that hung low off her narrow hips. A small bejeweled cartouche dangled from her visible bellybutton piercing. Superimposed, Darren saw the inevitable replica of the Spanish woman, with whites for eyes and mouth hanging open, tangled black hair wet to the touch with death-sweat. He snickered but inside he contemplated with fear the hurdles he would need to leap over if the murder eyes ever commanded him to fly to Europe to hunt down and kill some woman from foreign TV. He guessed that in the days before TV’s invention, before portraiture even, the eyes had been satisfied to select their victims “at first sight.” Just like live music was preferable to recorded, murder was much better with someone within arm’s reach. He wasn’t a long-distance stalker, driving eight hours to Hollywood to slaughter a Best Supporting Actress nominee he’d seen on HBO. Besides, Agnieszka the cocktail waitress was European and something had brought her across oceans into his view. He could sit still like a spider or alligator as prey haplessly stumbled inside the fatal radius of his knife. He mused how it would be to collect heads from around the globe, one woman from each country. Another wish, since he was at it, would be to time travel and find not famous historical women to behead but their servants, like the plain-Jane, downstairs beauties from Downton Abbey. One of his favorite shows, to Janice’s baffled delight.

To observe the panoply of women’s throats in movies and magazines was one thing, but when real flesh-and-blood was selected out of the crowd it was time to obey the eyes and act.

He credibly faked to his clueless family that the minivan was having some kind of trouble and needed servicing. He excused himself from one of Tommy’s games and told Janice to wait there at the camp. Then he camouflaged himself at JC Penney’s.

The next phase, while important, threatened to eat up precious time: a kind of insurance policy for his further actions. As he went about the preparations he reflected that killing would be much easier without a family in tow around which to shape his behavior. But then maybe the family was further camouflage. Without it he would be exposed as a monstrous entity up to deviant pursuits.

Downtown he found a tobacco store where they also sold a huge selection of magazines on all subjects: tattoos, pot, music, bikers, guns. He went to a display rack way in the back of the store where the magazines faced away from open view. He bought about five of these hidden-away magazines and was on his way back to Diamond Dream Camp when he realized he had no scissors. So he had to take valuable time going back to Family Dollar for scissors.

Once he was back in the cabin he knew he risked discovery by Janice or one of the two boys, who all thought he was at the dealership. They could have come back to the cabin at any time, for something to eat or read or to use the bathroom. And if they had, they would have stumbled across him performing his rituals and it would all come crashing down. He took the scissors, and out of the magazines he quickly but methodically cut nine women’s heads. Nine were necessary, and they had to be women in the throes of orgasm, features distorted with agonizing pleasure that out of context might have been horrifying pain. Mouths open in asymmetric moans, eyes closed and foreheads wrinkled.

Then on the floor of the cabin he laid down a rough circle of the clippings, took off his clothes and sat naked in the center of this mandala of disembodied heads he’d created. And closed his two normal person eyes.

His own head submerged under a stream of powerful thoughts he was grateful to receive although he didn’t fully understand all of them and was sure their meaning would be revealed later. The point was to open as many of the holy eyes as possible, to use this supersight to see his way to his target Agnieszka. Upon whom he would finally be able to release the energy of the death blow. He drew back the string of a mental bow that would only be released at the moment he took her life.

Once he reached the adequate level of focus and concentration Darren picked up all the heads, put on dark pants and a white t-shirt with the blood-red polo shirt on top. He tried to refrain from running to the parking lot: another logistical bottleneck where he might be spotted by Janice or Jake. He wasn’t. Once he was in the minivan he took a deep breath and told himself it was time to dive into the other branch of time and do the murder thing again like he had last year.

Bio:

Jesse Hilson is a writer living in the Catskills in New York State. His work has been published, or is forthcoming, in X-R-A-Y, Hobart Pulp, Excuse Me Mag, Exacting Clam, Expat Press, Maudlin House, and other publications. He has written two crime novels, Blood Trip (2022) and The Tattletales (2023), and a poetry collection Handcuffing the Venus De Milo. He can be found on X and Instagram at @platelet60.