Chapter 13
PHILIP LEANS AGAINST A brICK wall, wearing a medical face mask over his mouth and nose. After the pandemic, it became clear how different someone can look if you cover just their nose and mouth. It feels like the easiest and most effective way to stay unnoticed.
He pulls the mask away from his mouth for a second and breathes in the almost-crisp air, watching students mill around the campus across the street.
It’s a small community college, and everyone looks alive, like they have their whole lives in front of them.
The innocence has not yet been sapped from them.
Most of them have probably only just started to dip their toes into depravity, not knowing how quickly things can spiral out of control.
Life will quickly become less about eternity for them, or maybe to some of them it was never about that to begin with.
No one talks to them about salvation or sanctity; instead, they are taught to be free thinkers and to challenge authority, divine or otherwise.
He thinks back to his first couple of years at Pendleton University in New England.
He hadn’t been there long before he discovered, harnessed, and understood his greater purpose.
He’d felt like he was meant for something more than what he could be taught in college or law school.
His father had insisted that his path led to law school, that Philip would follow in his footsteps and become a judge or some other important part of the legal system.
He had always instilled strong Christian values in him, sometimes preaching like fire and brimstone might appear, but he didn’t want his son to make a living as a holy man.
Philip hadn’t cared. He’d made good on his promise to attend a university, to try to uphold his father’s carefully built reputation, but he always knew he would find a way to cleanse.
It began when he was a teenager, only fourteen.
She had made him so fucking angry, hiking her skirt up, trying to tempt him.
She was just another sinful descendant of Eve, stupid and without virtue.
Before he knew it, he had lost it and found himself standing over her with his hands around her throat.
He could see the terror in her eyes as she tried desperately to claw herself free, but he liked it.
He liked her struggle, and he liked the way he could draw it out for as long as he wanted.
He could have kept looking at her like that forever, but he’d stopped just as her face was turning purple.
He paid for that indiscretion, but not nearly enough to stop.
He tried to, but the Lord works in mysterious ways.
Years later he was presented with an opportunity to feel that rush again.
That was it. The real turning point for him had been Morgan.
It was as if God himself had placed her in his path that night.
Initially it had been an accident—all they’d had to do was call the police; they hadn’t meant to run her over.
As Philip watched Jeremy slide the knife across her throat, he had panicked.
He couldn’t believe what Jeremy had done right in front of him, and so confidently.
Philip had always released his demons in the dark, never willingly sharing them with anyone else.
That night with Jeremy was when it all changed.
Ever since he was fourteen with his hands clenched around that girl’s throat, knuckles white with his fury, he had fantasized about continuing to harm the women he regularly saw.
Finally experiencing what he had always needed at his core had awakened something inside him.
After that night, the fantasies no longer felt like movies in his head; they felt touchable.
It was like a release valve had opened, sending a rush of euphoria through him.
He stopped speaking to Jeremy after that night, not because he condemned what his friend had done but because it had set him free.
For his entire life, he had stifled the urge to truly punish a woman, to see one suffer for not knowing her place, for leaving a bar late at night dressed like a whore and thinking she could speak down to him.
She wasn’t a woman of God; most of them weren’t, and those were the ones who had to be cleansed. Jeremy had done what needed to be done.
He remembered how people used to talk about Jeremy’s mother. His own parents referred to her as “the harlot.” From a young age, he was taught to fear and loathe women like her, women who flaunt their promiscuity and their distance from the Lord and his teachings.
During his second year of college, he finally released the tension that had been building over his whole life.
He was walking back from a late-night study session in the library.
The open campus was dark and quiet; bare branches reached like gnarly fingers from the tree lines.
To him, it felt deserted, but that’s when he saw her.
He had often noticed her in his English lecture, but they had never spoken a word to each other before.
She wore tight clothes, like a second skin, or too much makeup—tonight she was wearing both.
There were a lot of evenings when he would go back to his dorm and fantasize about all the ways he could hurt her, make her submit to him under the Lord’s direction.
Sometimes he would find himself aroused at the images he conjured up.
Without much effort, he would watch these home movies play out behind his eyes, often blurring the line between lust and pain.
Sometimes he would sketch these fantasies, committing them to paper in a feeble attempt to pacify the urges as he had done when he was younger.
As he got older, it became more difficult to calm the feelings; he required a heavier dose of stimuli to feel satisfied.
Now the sketches acted less as a balm and more as a trigger to bring it all back—the feelings, the excitement, the euphoria.
That night on campus, there was a pull stronger than he had ever felt before—a blend of fear, anticipation, and hate—that weaved itself into his veins and refused to be ignored.
It was as if everything had been leading him to that moment, as if everyone had gone inside and shut their blinds just to allow him space to work.
She was walking toward him, and he looked around briefly to verify that the campus was in fact like a graveyard, with not another soul in sight.
As she passed by him, she shot him a small, friendly smile, although there was a look of unease in her eyes.
He hesitated for only a quarter of a second before he reeled around and punched her as hard as he could in the back of the head.
No sound escaped her lips, and she crumpled straight to the ground, her head hitting the grass next to the walkway with a thud. As soon as he had done it, he knew he had opened something that could never be resealed. There was no regret, no moment of questioning, just clarity.
He moved with a practiced urgency, instantly plucking her out of the grass and slinging her over his shoulder. Before leaving, he grabbed her purse, which had silently fallen to the ground beside her.
That night he took her deep into the woods surrounding the campus.
When they were far enough away, he tossed her onto the forest floor and just stared at her for a while, wondering what would happen next.
After a few minutes, she began to moan, waking and slowly reaching up to probe the back of her head.
The realization in her eyes came gradually as she looked around, finally noticing Philip sitting cross-legged about three feet from her.
When she saw him, she sat upright and struggled to back away from him.
“Who are you?” she asked in a panic, stopping with her back against a tree. “Where are we? What is this?”
She was frantic, looking around with glazed eyes, her head concussed.
“I am God,” he said with an eerie calm.
She didn’t try to get up and run. She sat there, useless and weak, begging him to let her leave. He didn’t.
He lunged at her, frantically hitting her and restraining her on the ground while he screamed all the reasons why she had found herself in this position to begin with.
During his frenzy, he violently ripped a piece of her shirt off and tied it tightly around her eyes.
Something about them just unnerved him; it felt like they were judging him.
He began to strangle her, but he released his hands just long enough to get close to her face and growl for her to repent to him so she could be free.
She did. She confessed all her sins that night on the cold forest floor just before he killed her.
He pulled the makeshift blindfold off before she took her last breath.
Suddenly her eyes weren’t unnerving. In fact, as the light seeped out of them, he found they were beautiful.
She was technically his first victim, and he didn’t even remember her name.
He learned it later, after she was found, but the information never seemed important enough for him to commit to long-term memory.
Today, he watches a new generation of disappointments walk across the college campus in front of him.
Something inside him feels like it jolts to life as his gaze fixes on a young woman wearing what amounts to a bathing suit top.
She’s confident, her stride smooth and strong as she turns the heads of a few of her fellow classmates.
Her brown hair is long and falls past her shoulders, bouncing with each step, and he can see her eyes sparkling under heavily made-up lashes.
He pictures what it would be like to cause the brightness in her eyes to dim, to be the person who humbles her for the first and last time. His jaw twitches, and he takes in a shaky breath, feeling his resentment turn into the rawest urge, the one he struggles to resist.
It’s as if his legs move independently of the rest of him, briskly carrying him across the street. He makes his way toward this girl until he finds himself in front of her, his eyes boring into her from above the mask.
She jumps, skidding to a stop.
“Excuse me,” she says, a hint of irritation coloring her tone.
A response doesn’t come naturally to him. He doesn’t have a real plan. He just allowed himself to get swept up in the urges, allowed himself to give over control. Now he stands in front of this girl, wanting more than anything to hurt her.
She makes a face of pure disgust. “Hello?” she asks mockingly.
He shakes his head, words slow to arrive. “I—I’m sorry,” he forces out. “I thought you were someone else.”
She rolls her eyes, prodding the hornet’s nest with her undisguised irritation.
“Great,” she says, pushing past him and sending a shock of anger through his body.
He lets her leave, keeping himself rooted to the spot where she left him. He waits for an undeterminable amount of time before he takes a deep breath and walks down the street, away from this campus, away from temptation.