Chapter 41: Dance, Dance, My Doll 05
Hestal hadn’t actually caught what Albanino said very clearly.
Because in that instant, his ears had already been drowned out by a boundless roaring—like boulders shattering, like the firmament collapsing, the kind of frenzied sound that every fevered patient hears in the dead of night, restless and unceasing. Billy lay collapsed in the corner, looking as though an invisible hand were draining the color from his body bit by bit, and the blood flowing across the floor reminded him of a mold-spotted bathroom, blood dripping drop by drop along the tiles.
And Anthony Sharp was turning around in shock—he clearly had no idea what sudden event had occurred in this room, nor had he ever anticipated encountering anyone else in this house. They stared at each other for a few seconds, and then Sharp suddenly sprang to his feet.
He was clearly preparing to flee, though the route he’d chosen was rather poor, since the remaining two people were blocking the doorway, so he simply bolted toward the window instead. Even if he could actually get out through the window—judging by the width of the window in this small apartment, he very likely couldn’t—he would at least break a leg from the height of the second floor.
This was enough to show that this was not an intelligent person, or at least not enough to suit Albanino’s tastes, but of course, the Sunday Gardener was not picky about the dead who belonged to him. He did not care what most people were like before they died; what he needed was the flesh and blood, the bones, those purely material things that could be shaped into form.
He never wasted time on fighting, and preferred to choose the most convenient method—a single slash to the throat of his target. To be honest, before leaving the house today, he truly hadn’t thought about definitely putting anyone to death, and he hadn’t even brought a handy knife with him. Albanino chose to remain where he stood, his expression still calm, quietly waiting for what would happen next.
The instant Sharp turned around, Hestal pounced.
To the average person, seeing him dressed in a suit and leather shoes, it would be hard to imagine that beneath this mask, his movements could be so fierce and agile. He tackled Sharpe at the waist, and the man reeking of alcohol fell to the floor with a heavy thud, cursing in panic. He didn’t even have time to turn and struggle free from Herstal’s grip before Herstal viciously wrenched his shoulder—then came a heart-stopping crack, clearly Sharpe’s arm being dislocated by force.
Another whimper was squeezed from his throat. Albarino watched them, unconsciously reaching up to touch his own Adam’s apple: the once-shocking bruise on his throat had faded, but the shallow white scar from that earlier blade wound still remained. Herstal was always like this—no matter what attitude he truly held toward Albarino in his heart, he had never once gone easier when he struck; or perhaps, for a man like him, desire and pain were inextricably linked from the very beginning.
Meanwhile, Herstal deftly drew a knife from his ankle—Albarino noticed the blade was long, certainly not the kind Herstal would carry in daily life; it was likely his hunting gear—pinned Sharpe down with his body weight, and with clean efficiency sliced through the Achilles tendons of both the man’s feet.
Some blood spattered onto the floor. Sharpe howled to the point that, if they hadn’t known the soundproofing was excellent, they would have worried the neighbors might call the police. Herstal held the knife in his hand and gave a light flick of his wrist; more droplets of blood scattered and fell along the blade onto the ground. Then, he drove the knife deep into Sharpe’s uninjured shoulder.
Sharpe’s entire body convulsed and twisted beneath his hold, but Herstal didn’t even bother to look at him. Herstal simply rose from the floor and walked over to Billy’s side.
Billy’s body was still trembling, blood streaming down his neck, while frothy blood sputtered intermittently from his throat—a truly harrowing sight. Albanino, from a doctor’s perspective, knew the young man had only minutes left to live, and that nothing could be done now; but he couldn’t see Hestal’s face: Hestal was facing away from him, half-kneeling before the young man, carefully avoiding stepping into any pools of blood. At this moment, what expression was on his face?
In any case, he didn’t move, didn’t try to stop the bleeding wound, didn’t speak. Billy looked at him, his eyes still frozen with disbelief and a great, great deal of pain, but that was all. Albanino could see the light in his eyes gradually dimming, that gaze cast toward a distant place they could never reach, and finally it stilled.
For a moment, none of them spoke. All that could be heard was Sharp lying on the ground, letting out intermittent groans, curses, and cries for help—it was hard to imagine how such sounds could so naturally blend together and emerge from one person’s throat.
Albanino walked past Sharp without a sideways glance and stood behind Hestal. If his guess about Hestal was correct, the other man couldn’t possibly like someone standing behind him at a moment like this—his tense shoulders and back made that clear. Before they knew each other, murder had still been a private, unspeakable activity, but this convention might not continue after today.
“He’s already dead,” Albanino pointed out quietly. “We could of course call an ambulance and have the doctors come try to resuscitate him without any hope, but no one survives losing that much blood—besides, the wounds on Sharpe’s body would be hard to explain to the police. You can’t write this off as excessive self-defense. You’re a legal professional, you know this better than anyone.”
Hestal didn’t answer. In fact, he merely stood up slowly and turned to face Albanino.
His pupils were dilated, his breathing rapid—the result of adrenaline surging through his bloodstream. It was a moment before Hestal spoke, his voice deep and hoarse. He asked, “Do you think I would try to save him?”
“That depends on how deeply you’ve empathized with this whole affair. But even setting aside those facts I can’t presume to speculate about, you’re also a fascinating mystery.” Albanino said, carefully diluting the part of his voice that threatened to carry a smile. The last thing he wanted right now was for Hestal to decide to lunge over and stab him too.
Hestal spoke: “My ’empathy’ regarding this matter—”
“Because you and I both understand that, from a moral standpoint, we shouldn’t blame the victim for being weak. Although from the perspective of what we do, discussing ‘morality’ seems like a joke to begin with.” Albanino shrugged indifferently, still looking directly at Hestal, and those green eyes once again made one feel uncomfortable. “But look at yourself, Hestal: you are so furious right now, and this fury isn’t just because of what that tasteless bastard did—you’re also furious because Billy chose to escape from all of this. Your anger at his escape is like your anger at yourself; so although you can certainly empathize with him, you won’t choose to save him. When you watch the soul leave his body, it’s like seeing the you from all those years ago.”
“The criminal psychologist also said you were the one who couldn’t empathize with humans,” Hestal sneered.
“That’s because you’re too close to me on every level. Being able to understand you doesn’t mean I have to completely overturn all of Olga’s research findings.” Albanino allowed himself a smile, and at that very moment the longest line of blood beneath Billy’s body was just about to creep past the soles of Hestal’s shoes. It looked like a slender crimson vine, capable of dragging the person standing there down into the abyss.
Then he asked, “Even though discussing time travel is meaningless right now, but hypothetically, if you had the chance to go back to the past, would you really just let yourself die in that moment when you tried to commit suicide?”
“This topic is indeed completely meaningless,” Hestal answered stiffly.
“From the perspective of psychologists, what this reveals is enormously significant.” Albanino clicked his tongue, but clearly conceded. “If you insist, let’s return to reality: what do you plan to do with that guy?”
—The “guy” in question, now that no one was blocking the door, was desperately trying to crawl toward the entrance to escape. One of his arms was dislocated, a knife was lodged in his other shoulder, and both of his legs were still bleeding. In this condition, Sharp twisted the arm he could still barely move and his other shoulder, crawling toward the door, the wounds beneath him dragging a long trail of blood across the floor.
The scene looked like a classic scene straight out of a horror movie—the one where a character dies the moment they appear, desperately trying to escape the monster behind them, only for the monster to grab their ankle and drag them back under the bed, until the unlucky protagonist discovers their utterly gruesome corpse.
Reality was probably not much better. Albanino watched Sharpe’s attempts to crawl toward the door for a while, then turned back to look at Hestal again. Even though this man no longer posed any threat to him, Hestal’s body language was still taut with tension. His breathing had steadied, but Albanino guessed his heart was still pounding like thunder.
They were immersed in a low moaning and the desperate rustling of friction against the floor. Hestal stared at the shocking red trail of blood and the man’s agonized writhing body, then said simply, “Leave him to me.”
“Of course,” Albanino flashed the other a brilliant smile, though he knew Hestal was in no mood to see it. “Happy to oblige.”
Albanino had never seen Hestal’s “working state”—neither in the courtroom nor on a mysterious night like this. That night at his house certainly didn’t count, because that matter had been mixed with far too many personal emotions. Since they both knew the victim would ultimately survive, then no matter how realistic everything before had been, no matter how painful, it was all meaningless.
And now he watched with his own eyes as Hestal dragged Sharp back to the center of the room, adding a vivid new stroke to the bloodstains on the floor. Sharp was still moaning in despair, and when Hestal pulled the knife from his shoulder, he suddenly burst out with a loud scream.
But none of it was any use. He was flipped over by Hestal, lying on the ground like a lamb waiting to be slaughtered, thrashing madly with all his might. But clearly none of it meant anything. Hestal wedged his knee against his shoulder and gripped his chin with his hand.
—He wasn’t wearing gloves, Albanino thought. He thought of his earlier deductions. Because latex and leather against the fingers didn’t feel intimate enough, he was quite certain that if Hestal were to pull the organs out bare-handed from a victim’s opened abdominal cavity, he definitely wouldn’t wear gloves. As for that time at Albanino’s house, the only reason he’d worn gloves was absolutely because he wanted to preserve the bloodstains on the floor intact, and therefore couldn’t clean the floor.
This was nothing for this crime scene. He knew very well that once all of this was done, they would have to scrub the entire room thoroughly with bleach until CSI could no longer detect a single DNA sample in here. Herstal, who couldn’t even find a single suitable condiment in the fridge, was nonetheless quite accomplished when it came to deep cleaning—it seemed like a rather comical thing.
And now Herstal was forcefully gripping the joint of Sharpe’s jaw, forcing his mouth open, and then thrusting the knife directly into his mouth.
The blade of that knife was too long, and Herstal hadn’t bothered to be particularly precise with his movements either. Albanino watched helplessly as he sliced off Sharpe’s tongue—of course the Westland Pianist would do that, of course, just look at those scars on Billy’s face—a limp, bloody chunk of flesh was flung onto the floor. This was done purely to keep Sharpe from choking to death on the piece of meat sliding into his trachea.
But he already looked like he was about to drown in blood. Although Albanino was thoroughly familiar with the method of a forensic examiner pulling an entire tongue out of a corpse’s jaw, he had no idea how much blood would flow if a living person’s tongue were cut off. When Herstal did that, he was straddling Sharpe’s body the whole time, while the latter thrashed and struggled wildly beneath him, blood gushing from his mouth, and when it poured back into his throat it made him cough uncontrollably.
“You could keep a dog.” Albanino looked at Hestal’s left hand holding the knife, and suddenly suggested, “When you kill people, throw the scraps to your dog to eat. I think that’s the kind of dramatic touch that film directors would appreciate.”
“I’m not some mafia godfather type.” Hestal answered without looking up, his voice cold, as if even the last trace of emotion had faded from his voice while he did these things. But even this version of him wasn’t shocking—the difference between the nighttime Hestal and the daytime Hestal was nothing more than the difference between a butterfly and its cocoon. Albanino could easily discern the commonalities between them.
Hestal continued his work. After Sharp lost his tongue, the whole affair had become considerably quieter. Albanino watched as Hestal very smoothly cut Sharp’s clothing into shreds and pulled it away, not as meticulously as he had done at Albanino’s home. This step was carried out entirely from a pragmatic standpoint: removing the clothing from the other’s body in the simplest way possible, without breaking the skin.
Finally, the Pianist knelt on the floor, the man’s naked body lying before him. Sharp’s gaze still brimmed with terror—the kind of wonder a child shows when hearing a parent tell religious demon stories for the first time before sleep. But perhaps the truth was this: in the deepest depths below the earth, there was no lake of sulfur and fire, no devil watching you at every moment, ready to drag you down to hell—but above the ground, there was.
“So,” Albanino said, “this is your blank canvas.”
Hestal didn’t answer that at all—Albanino wasn’t even sure if he was still listening to people. But it didn’t matter. His utterly focused appearance would be rated as exceptionally sexy by Albanino, who had dated quite a few men and women—if you mosaicked out the knife in his hand and that bloody mess in front of him, he could probably be rated as sexy by seventy-five percent of the world’s adults.
But Hestal wouldn’t know what Albanino was thinking. He was methodically carrying out his work: starting from Sharp’s continuously bleeding lips, he used the knife to cut off those two lips, until he forced the other to reveal stark white teeth, then tossed those two pieces of flesh onto the floor as well. Then the ears, the nose—those protruding parts that wouldn’t cause immediate fatal bleeding. He cut off the other’s genitals, and then Hestal began peeling the skin off the other’s chest along Sharp’s collarbone.
Even for the Westland Pianist, there were few moments when he made a scene quite this bloody. The air was filled with a nauseating stench of blood. At the instant the knife first cut in, the lines of the wound were still visible, but immediately a great deal of blood came surging out and blurred the wound, and the moments that followed, as the blade fell again and again, were practically a tour through blood.
—Even for the Pianist, this crime scene was a rare one, and Albanino could recall that case from April of this year, when a suspect believed to have raped and murdered four women was killed by the Pianist. He had slit open the victim’s abdomen, removed all the organs, then stuffed the victim’s severed limbs and genitals into the victim’s stomach, and finally sewed the victim’s abdomen back up.
Albanino still remembered that crime scene clearly even now—mainly, of course, because he was the one who had opened the stitches on the dead man’s abdomen and taken out those severed fragments of limbs. The dead man’s abdomen had been stretched by the limbs stuffed inside him to a degree that was physically sickening, and even Olga had admitted, “This time the Pianist’s scene seems really excessive.”
—See, that was the only reason it was excessive, the reason Albanino had been able to fish Hestal Amaret’s first crime out of the vast sea of cases in Kentucky like finding a needle in a haystack. Everything was so clear and obvious.
Herstal was wearing only a simple shirt, one that had a faint pearlescent gray sheen. Now the front of the garment and the cuffs were completely soaked through with blood, and fresh blood had already covered the previous stains before they had even dried. This was one of those moments when Herstal’s near-obsessive fastidiousness would not resurface, and Albanino guessed that he almost enjoyed the sensation of blood flowing over his fingers.
To do the work with precision required a great deal of time, but in reality, stripping away that patch of skin truly did not require anything as eternal as surgery. When Herstal did it, his movements even seemed a bit too practiced, yet in the Pianist’s cases, very few people had actually been flayed. Albanino could only surmise that this person had committed crimes in other states before coming to Westland to open a law firm.
In the end, Herstal peeled off the entire sheet of skin. Sharpe had already fallen into a state of semi-consciousness, and his torso now looked like nothing more than a bare slab of raw meat, red and white, almost no longer connected to anything human. Albanino watched as Herstal’s blade tip hovered over the other man’s abdomen, and he calmly reminded him: “If you make that cut, he’ll basically die immediately.”
Herstal knelt in the pool of blood, staring at the blood-drenched flesh. After a moment, he replied: “I know.”
Then he still drove the knife down, not deep, not enough to pierce the heart, but enough to make blood gush from the other’s body like a spring. The body convulsed beneath his fingers. Herstal dragged the knife wound all the way down, from chest to abdomen, then pulled the knife out, returned it to its original position, and stabbed down a second time as before.
When he repeated this action, it was as if he were simply savoring the sensation of the blade piercing flesh. Between the cuts was a clean, decisive straightness, without hesitation—just like… just like the trial cuts on Hestal’s wrist, like the fresh scars beneath Billy’s cuff.
“Actually, it was in the school restroom.” Hestal suddenly said, as if reading his mind and knowing exactly what Albanino was thinking.
“What?” Albanino asked.
Hestal tossed the knife in his hand onto the floor. The sharp clatter seemed to signal that he had grown tired of it and intended to take the other man’s life with a final method. He pulled a small coil of piano wire from his pocket and wrapped the unbreakable metal cord around Sharpe’s neck, beginning to tighten it slowly, without hesitation.
Even though the other man had already fallen into unconsciousness, his body instinctively struggled at that moment, like a fish that had been scaled and gutted yet still thrashed on the cutting board. Hestal stared down at him, his hands extremely steady, the piano wire sinking deep into Sharpe’s neck, destined to leave one last horrifying mark.
“At school,” Hestal continued, “one night after that incident, I didn’t go home after class. I locked myself in the school restroom and slit my wrist open with a paper cutter.”
Now his wrists were completely soaked in someone else’s blood, and he could no longer make out anything clearly.
“You’ve always been hard on yourself, always have been.” Albanino recalled the scars he had seen beneath Hestal’s cuff on the night Landon died, and spoke with measured deliberation.
“But even then, I was still stupid enough not to know where the vein actually was.” Hestal let out a cold snort.
“Then what happened?” Albanino asked. He genuinely wanted to ask whether the other had regretted it, whether they had tried again, but he also knew he would not get an answer—there was no point in it.
“I’ve been suspended from school,” Hestal replied, frowning slightly as he spoke. His fingers remained steady in the air, and Sharpe’s body finally stopped convulsing—his breathing had ceased.
It was at that moment that Hestal looked up at Albanino: his expression was utterly calm, his hair immaculate, yet a drop of fresh blood had splattered onto his cheekbone at some point without him noticing. He knelt in the pooling blood, behind the corpse that was still stiffening, at the very center of the deathly aura that lingered in the room, his gaze cold and sharp, a mad turbulence hidden beneath the calm blue depths of his eyes.
Albanino drew a deep breath.
The two of them remained silent, as though any sound would shatter the scene before them. Then Albanino strode forward, stepping into the pool of blood, and as he knelt beside Hestal he felt the blood gradually soaking through his pants.
Then he reached out and seized the other’s fingers that were holding the knife, feeling the slick skin and the blood that covered his hand. Albanino grasped his hand and leaned forward, kissing Hestal’s lips.