Demons

The sun peeked through the slit that was the horizon between the eyelids of the night just as I opened mine and rubbed my eyes groggily, trying to jerk myself awake and embrace that cold January morning. The weather, albeit biting and unforgiving, was breathtakingly beautiful nonetheless, especially in the blank stretches of the white canvas that was the British Columbian topography. Daylight in Canadian winters is a luxury one can't afford to waste, so I hastily chided myself into getting up and bustling about the day.

I lived in a small ski-town called Revelstoke, nestled in the southeastern region of the province of British Columbia, right on the banks of the Columbia River. It was often bustling with tourists looking for a getaway from their exhaustingly mundane lives through different adventure sports; skiing, snowmobiling, and paragliding to name a few. Rather unsurprisingly, I worked at one of the ski lodges, clocking in and out daily in what was otherwise a rather ironically lackluster existence in a paradoxical paradise to most people.

But that morning had something special; the cold wasn't biting into my flesh as hard. This tingling that I felt, I'd only seen in spiderman movies before, a premonition-of-sorts to something significant about to go down in this prosaic life of mine. But of course, I did not know that then, and merely cast it aside as nothing of importance; foreknowledge of revelations is obvious only in retrospection.

Growing up in the Canadian countryside was pretty uneventful, to say the least. I was a reserved kid, not really fitting in anywhere, sticking out like a sore thumb; losing my parents at the enormously tender age of seven didn't help the cause. I was brought up by my ever-so-slightly manically paranoid uncle who liked shooting at anything that moved; I think it really pissed him off that he couldn't shoot the humans he deemed a pain in the ass as well. He was far from perfect, but at least he taught me how to handle a gun if I ever needed 'to go down south', in his own words. "You will be shot by those Americans if you don't learn to defend yourself, they have no bloody gun control." He used to drop this statement so nonchalantly as if it were a matter of fact, which was ironic coming from him, seeing that he was so obsessed with arms himself; my uncle wasn't one to introspect.

After taking a quick shower and hastily grooming up, I was off to do the daily chores. Milk and groceries were on that day's to-do list, so I quickly ran down to the supermarket to get them before getting to work. On the way through, I got distracted by the distraught sight of a cat stuck up a tree. "Fifth this week, it's getting very common." I murmured to myself, decidedly disappointed, as I borrowed a ladder from a nearby hardware store and got it down. The visit there reminded me of the knives I was short of and needed to restock on. Buying the needed supplies from the store and subsequently the supermarket, I returned home with the cat, which I'd deemed to be a stray after some inspection, finished up with everything and left for work.

Growing up, I was always surrounded by animals, incessantly drawn to the distressed, not out of empathy like most people, but out of pity. Helping little beasts out of a fix seemed to be a way to make myself feel empowered in an otherwise impuissant existence. It wasn't love, it was a necessity that drew me to do it. It made me feel like I had control over at least something; whether those doomed creatures survived or not was at my will. This habit-of-sorts seemed to have trickled down into adulthood even when I didn't feel the need to balance the non-existence of an exuberant social life with a sense of superiority like I did as a child. Perhaps empathy finally got through to me.

Work had never been busier in a while, especially as it was peak tourist season. People flocked by the dozens to rent skis and snowmobiles. This made it necessary to fix the fuel tank of the snowmobile that got damaged the day before by an overzealous excursionist. I had put it at the top of my priority list for the day, as I had been too knackered to do it the day before. But unfortunately, as fate would have it, the happenstance of my delay due to my rendezvous with the cat made me late for work that day. By the time I reached there, some inefficient dimwit newbie had already rented it out after filling up the moderately leaking tank, assuming that it had been empty by sheer chance. The worst part of it was that the guy who'd rented it was alone and had driven off into the unknown terrain towards the Revelstoke National Park, a cellular dead zone where you hear stories of wild bears escaping from the park into the nearby areas almost every other day. This could turn into a litigation nightmare fast.

Even though I'd never been the alpha in the room, I had never been good with commands. A really poor position to be in, I could never really give orders quite well and in the end, had to take them from someone morbidly and resentfully. It can be called rather darkly funny that I tried to find solace for that fact in my encounters with animals.

So when the boss vociferously shrieked at me for being so thoroughly imprudent at my job and I had to be the one who went out looking for the guy to make sure that he didn't die at the hands of a grizzly, you can safely assume that I wasn't too happy about it. Picking up a shotgun, I hopped on the spare snowmobile kept for maintenance rounds around the resort and followed the tracks on the guy's tail.

The journey was arduous, given the fact that the guy had had a thirty-minute headstart. On the way, my head started to make some absurdly curious correlations of my current state of affairs with something I'd experienced before, but in a different context. The sense of control was returning to me, only this time it was with a human. This guy would most likely be killed by either a grizzly or a blizzard if I didn't do anything about it. Fate had so serendipitously put me in the driver's seat of this man's existence. And boy, was it better than any lowly beast. Reveling in this school of thought, I was consumed with a feeling; the feeling of wanting to know what something feels like. It started to crawl in my head towards the epicenter of my thoughts. Just as I saw a stationary speck at a distance in the snow, I started to swim in this contemplation. My head started to go back to the events of that morning. I started to mull over how I had controlled that cat's life. I thought about how I saved it from a slew of dangers it might have encountered had I not acted. I thought about how I took it home and provided shelter to it. I thought about how I killed it with the kitchen knife that I bought from the hardware store. I thought about the other four cats that I'd killed that week. I thought about how killing each of them had made me feel so infinitely more powerful than saving any of them. I thought about how killing nothing but cats that week had made it disappointing, monotonous and almost boring. I thought about all the animals that I'd encountered in all these years and how slaughtering them had made me feel. Then I thought about what the control over this man's fate felt like. And the difference was enough to tip me over the edge. As I approached the man standing in the snow near his broken-down snowmobile, waving frantically to draw my attention, unaware that I was coming for him; I stopped, got down and walked towards him. I swung the shotgun from my back, held it up pointing forward as I approached him, and saw the look of relief on his face convolute into horror and confusion. Without saying a word, I pulled the trigger in cold blood, both literal and metaphorical, and the deafening roar of the shotgun pierced the silence of the snowy mountains as I tasted human blood for the first time. The man stood there motionless for a second, not comprehending what had happened, clutched the gaping wound on his stomach and only managed to whisper, "Why?" before he slumped to the ground as I watched life leak away from his body, much like the fuel tank of the snowmobile that sealed his fate, dying without ever knowing why.

Of course, I got caught. You don't impulsively kill someone and get away with it. Even the best-planned murders are caught due to one tiny slip-up; this was a highly capricious step I took which propelled my life into the realm of everything hitherto unknown to me. Since that fateful day fourteen years ago, I've sat in this prison cell and thought about that feeling of unprecedented and inexplicable contentment and control I had when I took that man's life. Although nobody knows exactly why I did it even after all these years, and nobody would probably understand, but I don't think I'm a psychopath. I think I'm merely someone who didn't hesitate to act on his deepest desire. Most people are too terrorised by their unspoken urges to ever act on them; all of them too scared to face their demons and overcome them. I merely stood out from that herd.

My parole hearing was today. They've cleared me to go out and rejoin the world as I'm deemed to no longer be a threat to society. Of course, I don't ever wanna go back to prison. It's a bleak and formidable place, with dank walls and ghastly people, both the inmates and the correctional officers. People who have murdered for money or for revenge. People who have raped and robbed; pedophiles and cannibals. It's awful and atrocious. I'll just have to make sure I never get caught again.