My friends! Life has been wonderful and busy and chaotic and challenging and painful and so exquisitely full of beauty. To celebrate us muddling through together, I want to give you a gift.
Once upon a time in 2013, I wrote a short story for this now out-of-print anthology titled Let It Snow: Season’s Readings for a Super Cool Yule. It was so long ago that I still had two spaces after each period. Yes, I did. Anyway, I wrote a story about a young murderer named Peter, and his desire to invite his perfect victim, Bryony, over for a Christmas party.
Yes, it’s a story about Peter from my favorite novel Pretty Little Dead Girls: A Novel of Murder and Whimsy! PLDG was written but not yet published, and I was having difficulty stepping out of that world. Thanks to this story, I didn’t have to.
Happy Holidays, my friends. I hope you know how precious you are to me, and I hope you enjoy a little something I can share with you. All my love, darlings. <3
A Serial Killer Christmas
By Mercedes M. Yardley
Something about the holidays made our dear Peter sad. Perhaps it was the dreary weather or his mother’s murder when he was a child, or maybe it was simply the grating Christmas carols that looped over and over and over, but the end result was despair and a good dose of desperation.
But this year! This year Peter had something different than all of the other years before, and that was a friend. Well, truthfully perhaps she was more of a victim, but in this day and age, a victim is nearly as good as a friend, and isn’t that what the holidays are all about? Friendship and victimhood?
Peter combed his hair carefully, awkwardly whistling, “Do You Hear What I Hear?”, which he thought his mother used to sing to him, but he really couldn’t remember anymore. After that, he switched to a few other carols until he eventually decided on “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.”
“What a charming song,” he thought, evidently not realizing that it’s a rather chilling and predatory song indeed, but to Peter, it was a song about love and two strangers coming together and all of the wonderful things that would happen when Bryony came to his Christmas party this evening.
Oh, there were so many things to be done! He stood with his hands on his hips, nodding in approval at his sturdy wooden table and clicking his tongue at the bare state of the apartment. This wouldn’t do. It’s clean and respectable, just as a bachelor’s home should be, and most especially if the bachelor happens to be a serial killer, such as our darling Peter is. It’s ever so much easier to pull up roots and flee town if there are few things to pack and drag behind one, but my goodness, this is a party! A party for his beautiful Bryony, and this simply wouldn’t do. It needs to be special, to have glitter and shine. He must get to work immediately.
First, to invite the guest of honor. He took a snowflake that he had painstakingly cut out of tissue paper the day before. It was light and festive, covered in glitter, and if it looked more like an ornament that a small child had made for his or her mother, well, Peter certainly wasn’t aware of that. To him it was a jewel, a tiara, the Hope Diamond. It was precious and perfect, and he knew that, if allowed to live that long, Bryony would fold it carefully and sleep with it under her pillow, dreaming sweet dreams of his love for her.
“Thank you for killing me, darling,” she would say on the day that he murdered her. She would pull the snowflake out of her pocket and Peter’s eyes would widen with delight. “Yes, I kept it all this time, and it truly was a comfort and a joy to me, and I would love to hold it in my fingers while you drain the life from me. For it was my destiny to be murdered, and you don’t know what a comfort it is to have you be the one to do it. Thank you, my friend!” Then she would smile prettily, this woman who was born to die, and offer her white throat.
“Oh, Bryony, you simply are so good to me! You’re everything that I ever wanted, in a woman and a victim, and I am so very glad that I am the one to fulfill the darkness of your destiny. For I was born to kill, you see, and seeing as you were born to die, it works out so beautifully for both of us! How did we ever become so lucky?”
But Peter realized that his fantasies were running away with him again, and he hadn’t even sent his invitation yet.
“Come to my place tonight at seven.” He printed as carefully as he could, so that the message wouldn’t get lost. There was no need to sign his name, for she would intuitively know who it came from, and he rushed to his window, prying it open and flinging the snowflake into the wind and weather.
“Take it to her!” he shouted into the darkness, and the wind, who can be either quite dutiful or mischievous by turns, stole the snowflake away into the night.
But the party, oh the party! Peter pulled out decorations, boxes and bags of things that he had recently purchased. He hauled a Christmas tree inside, which flung snow this way and that, generally making a nuisance of itself. He ripped open a box of shiny ornaments, each having absolutely no sentimental meaning to him, and hung them on the tree. He covered it in tangled lights, in tinsel, and in bows. Then Peter the Murderer put a shining star on top. He had almost bought an angel at the store, but it seemed too ironic and almost cruel to have it in his home. While he was certainly no angel, Bryony would become one by the time he was through with her, and he didn’t want to tip his hand too early.
And then there was the matter of presents. He had chosen them carefully for his guest. A pair of star earrings that he had kept from a previous victim. A picture of a bird that he had taken, hopping in the snow. It was sure to please her, for she dearly loved lost little things, and since it was so cold and hopeless in winter, this bird was surely lost. Perhaps it could be her pet in the afterlife, and sit upon her shoulder? Perhaps it would sing of joy and greatness? Peter felt a stab of sorrow that he hadn’t killed it when he had the chance, that it wouldn’t be ready for his darling when she stepped seamlessly through to the other side, that it wouldn’t greet her with cheery cries. Unless…
The wind was raging outside, the snow dark and horribly threatening.
“I shall take your life and your soul!” the storm yowled fiercely. It seldom blew through this area, you see, and had to make a grand show of it whenever it did. “Nothing shall survive my treachery!”
The bird, if it still lived, most surely wouldn’t make it through the night. Peter smiled at this, considerably cheered.
“I never want you to be lonely, Bryony,” he vowed earnestly. “You were meant to be happy, and happy you shall be, and after all of this ‘living’ business is behind us, we shall have the most exquisite of eternities!”
Last of all, he wrapped a scarf that a dear friend had given him when he was in high school. She was a pretty thing, all dark hair and dark eyes, and a smile that made him warm even when it was the coldest nights. She had died prettily, as he had supposed she would, even though he was still new, and his hands shook in a most unseemly way.
“I’m sorry,” he had whispered to her. “This is what I am meant to do, but I am so very new at it, you see. One day it will be instinctive, and my hands will automatically do what needs to be done, but as for now, I am still a little nervous.”
“Oh, it is quite all right,” she said. Or at least Peter is sure that is what she would have said, for she was so very understanding and sweet, but she wasn’t really saying much of anything by that point, being quite dead. But how beautiful. How divine. They were closer than ever, and he had never parted from that scarf before, but this was different. This was for Bryony. This was for love.
He pressed the scarf to his face briefly, then set it in the box and wrapped it. Sitting back on his heels, Peter saw his lonely living room transformed into something wonderful, something full of magic and promise.
“This is what a real holiday is like,” he told himself, and then nodded, because it was just right. The table was perhaps a little bare, the chairs empty because he had killed most of the people who would otherwise sit there, but all in all it was a festive scene that would warm every heart.
Ah, but would it warm Bryony’s? Would it?
He set his knife on the seat next to him, leaned back in his chair, and hummed merrily while he waited for her to arrive.
