The gaslight effect.

A week into knowing Casey, I knew he'd be the kind to stick around. About a month into knowing him, I was convinced he would kill someone, someday. I was right on both counts. Only, I had assumed that like your run of the mill psychopath, he would wind up killing/gutting an unsuspecting hitchhiker or a stray prostitute. But, like the tasteful sociopath that he had been, he stuck to killing our good friend Penny with a knife and his father with a frying pan, or a sauce pan, I'm not sure. 

Like most tragedies, this one began with love and ended with death. But like most tragedies, this story is also about betrayal.   

The tragedy in this case was the murder of Penny Redmayne. It was on the news for longer than most stories, but like most stories it was eventually forgotten after a politician made a sexist comment and a Kardashian popularized a new plastic surgery procedure. It may have been forgotten by the media but not by the little  town where the air of tragedy still lurked in the air like the stench in the room where Penny's body had been found stabbed multiple times and with chunks of flesh missing. I was there when they found the body, everything had been happening so fast right until they broke open the door behind which Penny's still body was resting against a wall with flies swarming around her rotting body. Everyone at the scene were seemingly frozen in spot right until they saw him curled up in a fetal position a few feet away. Covered in what seemed like her dried blood Casey Pearson just sat there and looked at us in a way that told us he was dead despite his beating heart with a knife loosely held by his blood stained fingers. He was cuffed and taken to the station and by the next day the knife was confirmed to be the murder weapon and he was found dead in the waiting cell. The cops said he slit his writs with a broken toothbrush. It was later that day that they had found his father dead in their home killed with a pan with Casey's fingerprints all over it. There were so many questions left unanswered, yet there was something about what happened that made even the cops afraid of finding out more about Casey and everything he'd done. Three days later as he was lowered into the damp ground, he took with him all the answers to questions everyone was too fearful to ask and left the town with a mystery that would be better off unsolved.

Like most tragedies, this one began with love and ended with death. I witnessed both. Like most tales of love, it started with the boy meets girl cliche. Only, after the boy met the girl, he soon loved her and she did too, but not like he did. When I say that Casey loved Penny, I don't mean it in a romantic way. He once said it himself, the romantic kind of love was too dirty, too tarnished to be what he felt for Penny. He loved her in a way a nun loves God, pure and unadulterated by physical desire. At first she didn't mind, but the second she figured out the extent to which he was taken by her, she tried her best to keep him at bay. But he didn't take it too well and never took a step back despite her refusal to acknowledge him. Sure, she stopped talking to him, but he always made sure that he knew what was going on with her. He'd ask me or he'd just lurk around her and figure it out for himself. It wasn't always creepy, but there came a time I had a pretty good idea about how this would end.

If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. Well, if it looks like a sociopath and walks like a sociopath and talks like a sociopath, its probably a Casey. This isn’t some shitty WebMD diagnosis where I shoved in the symptoms ‘creepy’ and ‘obsessive’ and the diagnosis ‘sociopath’ showed up with a side of prostate cancer. Seeing the inner sociopath that lurked in him was a little like looking for latent homosexuality in a middle aged man married to the woman who birthed his three kids under the roof of their suburban home; he may give off a vibe, but there isn’t really much to support it. But gaydars exist for a reason and so do sociopath sensors? I’d always been thought that to look for something, I’d have to look really close, after a while I learnt the key is in looking long enough. Everything has a time stamp, from skimmed milk to botox.

Back to the middle aged guy and his wife. You can look closely and things may seem fine, they’ll have planned sex missionary style and she’ll obviously fake it, but so do most women married for a while and a whole four and a half minutes later he’ll collapse beside her with a post orgasmic look on his face and kiss her goodnight. But look long enough and you’ll find him staring at the hot waiter’s ass while on a romantic date with his wife. Look long enough and boring ole’ Casey will tell you he could kill your math teacher without an ounce of remorse. 

Casey was the kind of guy no one took seriously because he just had an average face. What I mean is, looking at average Casey, no one would think he was capable of understanding advanced mathematics, let alone killing two people. This wasn't something he missed out on either. But I knew his mediocrity was just something covering up his sociopathic disposition. Sometimes I wonder if I should have told him that he was a sociopath, maybe that would have made him feel special during those many phone calls with him crying on the other end of the line talking about how he's too average for someone like Penny. 

I sensed a pattern with him. He'd try to talk to her, she'd make small talk, he'd get frustrated by the small talk and then he'd cry. But after he stopped crying, he'd get angry and that's when Casey was truly alive. He would transform into this whole other person, one I suspected was always clawing at his skin, waiting to come out. But soon enough, he'd reel it all in and go back to being boring ol' Casey.

He was convinced that she was the only person worth having in his life. But she didn't want him, so in came his need to have me in his life. She was like a cigarette, and I was a nicotine patch. But he didn't use me to get over her, instead I severed as a reminder of what he could have, a little taste of heaven until he could get to the gates. I knew that from the very beginning, but I stuck around because you get used by people all the time, but you don't meet a sociopath everyday now do you? 

Casey's heart broke when she didn't love him like he loved her. But when she gave that love to someone who wasn't him, every part of Casey broke. Then the most beautiful thing happened, the broken pieces that had once formed Casey rearranged themselves to form Casey. Everyone in school had found out that Penny began seeing her long time friend James Rivers and everyone was talking about how in love they seemed. Casey didn't want the same kind of love, but it was more than he ever got. He couldn't take the pain that hit him every time he saw them together, so he decided to put an end to it. Now despite popular belief, Casey was relatively smart, clubbed with his capability to do anything for Penny, he was unstoppable. He knew that ultimately, two things break couples: when there's a person who comes between them, or when a secret comes between them. But Casey was never good at keeping secrets, so that's why he told me how he gave James the secret that would come between them.

He told me how he befriended James' sister who was two years younger than us and found out their parents weren't going to be home for a few days. Then one sunny day, he went over to their house with some animal tranquillisers, some ecstasy pills, a camera and a gun with the intention of sharing a secret. He got James' sister drunk and then drugged her and when James came in through the front door after basketball practice Casey pulled the gun on his sister who had passed out on the couch. Knowing that James would do anything to protect his sister, he told him that the only way to keep him from pulling the trigger was to fuck their dog that had been drugged too until he ejaculated. He had been right, James was ready to do anything for his sister, even fucking their dog. Little did he know that Casey recorded a weeping James as went through with the deed. Alas, the secret was born. He then threatened James that if he told anyone, including the cops, he'd leak the video. Even James knew that as satisfying as seeing Casey behind bars would be, nothing in the world was worth that video going public, so he did exactly what Casey told him to. He broke up with Penny the next day and never said a word about what happened.

The next day, Casey sported a smile and Penny sported a broken heart. Over the next few weeks, his smile faded, but her broken heart didn't. When Casey found out she was failing math, he felt guilty. So like the caring friend that he was, he decided to make amends. He stayed back during math class and had a little chat with their teacher. Then the day after that, he stayed back again. After two weeks, he had her bent over her desk when he pulled his phone out and took a quick recording of her near naked body and muffled moans. He stayed back the next day and showed her the video and told her to change Penny's grades or the video would be sent to the Principal.

The next day he watched as Penny returned from the teacher's desk with a confused look on her face. He continued to watch her the next day and the day after that when she tried to get James to talk to her. He then watched as she continued to wear the look of gloom when Casey finally realized that no matter what he could do, the only thing that would make her happy was James. More importantly, he realized that he could not make Penny happy. So he called me, and said goodbye before hanging up. I knew what that meant, I knew it would come eventually, but the timing wasn't right. It couldn't end like this, if he killed himself this would end like most tales of unrequited love and I couldn't have that, not after all I'd done. So I drove around town till I finally found him in the place I should've started, outside Penny's house. I drove him home and talked him out of it. I knew that all I did was buy myself time, I could let him pick a shitty ending, or I'd have to act fast.

The next day, Casey didn't come to school. As midnight approached he called me and told me to go over to his house. Like most things, Casey wasn't good at keeping secrets, so he told me about how his father was drunk and shouted at him for not going to school and how he lost it before hitting him with a frying pan and how he panicked and begged Penny to just come over to his house one last time because he just needed her after what he had done. He then told me about how she went over to his house and began to run after she saw his father's body and how he consecutively hit her with a sauce pan.

After I heard his narrative, I gave him a glass of water and as I glanced at the two bodies in the kitchen, one dead and one alive, I wrote the ending to this story. You read it too, at the very beginning. Four days later Casey was found with a murdered Penny and the knife that killed her. He didn't say anything and then he killed himself. If you've been paying attention, you'll realize that so far, this has just been a story about love and death. But I promised you that like most tragedies, this one is about betrayal too. I keep my promises, so I'll tell you the ending that I wrote.

With the glass of water, I also gave Casey something to calm him down, and then a few minutes later, I gave him some more. Then I told him to put Penny in his car and by the time I could get to the car Penny wasn't the only unconscious person in the car. Then, with some dishwashing gloves on and a knife, I drove to Casey's family cabin outside town and with immense difficulty got the two unconscious bodies inside. This was meant to be the final chapter, how things were supposed to end. So I took the knife and made sure to cut deep into Penny's neck to ensure she'd bleed out to death. I also slipped in some sleeping pills in her too, the same ones I had given Casey. Then I took the knife and made Casey's unconscious hand grab it to make sure his prints got on it. I threw the gloves in the fireplace and left the cabin with the first draft of the story that would light up screens all over the country in a matter of days. I was almost certain once Casey woke up he would be convinced he did it and I was certain he'd kill himself, eventually. But what I didn't anticipate was that he'd find the body and stab it over and over again, 36 times, to be exact. I didn't imagine that he'd carve out chunks of her flesh and ingest them. I had been looking to write the perfect story for two years, with Casey as my muse. But the thing about good stories is the best parts tend to write themselves. 

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