Behind Locked Doors

Andes could have mourned.

Andes could have cried his heart out until he was coughing up blood, but nothing left his lips as he stared at the cold corpse beneath him.

The knife in his hands trembled at his side. He was shaking. Every bone in his body was shuddering but he sat still nonetheless, paralyzed with the certainty of his actions. His knees on either side of the bleeding body, scarred down to his ankles were drenched in thick red blood that seeped seemingly never-ending onto the floor.

It felt surreal. Andes had only dreamed of this scene.

Andes could have felt shame, but not an ounce of that existed.

He could have felt fear as he stared deeply into the corpse’s dead brown eyes. He could have felt anything other than this silent hollowness that grew every passing second he sat on its wet stomach.

The knowledge that Epher was finally dead should have made him feel something. The knowledge that he had killed a man, a man this important would be enough to make a normal man faint, but Andes wasn’t normal. He couldn’t even fathom what it meant to be that anymore.

Andes could lie to himself. He could convince his conscience that he never meant to drive this sharp knife into Epher’s chest this night of all nights. He could plead his innocence to the Gods who witnessed this that he never meant to take joy in hearing Epher’s screams of agony and pleas to stop, to have mercy on his pitiful soul, but Andes knew he couldn’t.

Not when he wished to repeat this savagery. To stab Ehpher one more time, over and over until the knife was lodged deep, deep enough into his lifeless body, they would have to bury him with it.

Andes felt the tears finally spring to life from his eyes, but it wasn’t from regret. It wasn’t from fear. It was from the sheer fact that he had been merciful enough to grant Epher the sweet taste of death when the man had never even wanted to gift him that.

Epher had loved him. If love was meant to be as gut-wrenchingly barbaric as Epher had been to him. Epher had cherished him. If cherishing something was painting them with bruises without mercy every night while spewing some bullshit even a wretched man wouldn’t believe.

Andes clutched the knife again with his two bloody hands that were shaking. The tears streamed down his face as his knees dug into the floor. He lifted his arms over his head. He sobbed pitifully, tears streaming down his angelic face just like Epher had liked it. Andes found it a crime to be crying for a man who made his short life a living hell.

He drove the knife down straight into the already dead Epher’s throat, piercing the flesh seamlessly, and blood spurted out on Andes’s face. Epher jerked, and blood spilt from his mouth.

Andes cried harder as he dragged the knife out and drove it back into the same spot with the intent to make it rip his tonsils apart.

Wretched moans of sorrow spilled from his bloody, matted lips as he pulled the knife out and drove it in again and again and again until a blood-curdling scream wrenched from the pit of his stomach that rattled the flimsy small cabin’s windows.

He screamed. He screamed all the years filled with agony, anguish, pain, turmoil and anger into the night air. He sobbed uncontrollably over the same body that had been alive a mere hour ago. A man who had seemed immovable, like a boulder that crushed him, had suffocated him with just his shadow.

Epher had gone down too easily, too fast, with just three stabs to the heart with just a kitchen knife. It was anti-climactic, pathetic and cruel.

Even the gods had mercy on such an evil man, but not him.