Rebecca Jones-Howe

Copyright © 2020 by Rebecca Jones-Howe

All rights reserved. This story or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

“Dear Mitchell,” I read. “I’ve been a longtime listener of Dear Murderer. I find your interviews thrilling. I feel like you’re talking to me. You might get intimate in your line of questioning but it makes me feel put on the spot in the right kind of way. My favourite serial killer is Robert Pickton. I wish I could explain myself to you. All the best, Megan.”

It’s not a real letter.

I wrote it to sound like a real letter, because all the real letters are full of the same thing over and over, women begging me to acknowledge them, to interview them, to make them the next featured guest on the show.

The first season of Dear Murderer featured them. Real women.

They liked Ted Bundy even despite his smugness. They liked Richard Ramirez even though his teeth were nasty. They liked Jeffrey Dahmer even though he exclusively raped and murdered boys. They liked to get detailed, admitting that if they were in Karla Homolka’s shoes that they’d let Paul Bernardo rape their little sister too.

I got a Phantom of the Opera mask for recording, meant to keep my identity a secret, but the women enjoyed it, the mysteriousness, the supposed danger.

I just wanted to know why hybristophilia was a thing but then that thing manifested.

I wanna meet you.

I feel like you know me.

Your voice gives me such a wide-on.

The podcast needed variety, needed depth. I couldn’t talk about Charles Manson anymore. I wrote scripts. I hired actresses. We’d discuss the script and record in a motel room under a non-disclosure agreement. The mask unnerved the actresses. They gave a better performance under pressure, emotion cutting into the words on the page.

I thought the audience would change but it didn’t.

Some of the actresses became fans themselves. They kept my secrets, sent me messages, sent me nudes.

I don’t read many of the comments anymore. I know what they say, what they want. They’re just women climbing up from the depths, hoping to amuse me.

Most nights I spend in front of the computer watching recorded stage plays and theatre actress demo reels. One might say that I stalk actresses now, but I’m just looking for the good ones, the ones who can get raw and mentally exposed. I like it when their voices shake the way I want them to.

I never miss The Vagina Monologues.

The most honest of actresses end up putting on a proper show.

Megan is real.

Her voice might not be, but it shook a little when she walked out onstage to perform the monologue about the Salem Witch Trials guy discovering the clitoris for the first time. It was chilling. I looked her up. She smiled with friends in her photos. She wrote thoughtful posts about current events. I took my time before calling. She intimidated me. She seemed normal. Approachable, which triggered my nerves in the way that women never do anymore.

I want to feel you hold a knife to my throat.

I wish you’d call me and threaten to kill me.

I need your hands around my neck.

“Who’s your favourite serial killer?” I ask over the phone. I’m in my apartment, sitting in front of my computer, pressing a fork into a microwaved spaghetti dinner.

“That’s kind of a morbid question,” she says.

“It’s kind of a morbid podcast,” I reply.

“I should probably listen to a few episodes before I agree to do this.”

“It might be better if you don’t.” I twist the fork through the strings of pasta.

“Why?” she asks.

Outside, there’s a voice. Two girls pass outside the window of my ground-floor apartment and I turn the blinds so they can’t see in. “I’d rather not interview people who are fans.”

“Why?”

“Because they never want to talk to me about their hybristophilia.”

“And you trust that I can act as though I have hybristophilia?”

“Your Monologues performance at least convinced me that you could.” I tap at the script I sent. It’s the finale of season 3, where she’s set to appear as “Megan” from the fan letter, a woman infatuated with Robert Pickton.

“What if the listeners don’t buy my acting?”

I shrug. “I liked it.”

Her breaths linger. They’re faint but I close my eyes and imagine how the little waveforms would ebb and flow on the computer screen. I record all my phone calls now. Everything is inspiration, possible footage, possible to twist into a script.

You know what I want.

“Originally the podcast was for people like me,” I admit. “Men who didn’t understand women’s obsession with true crime.”

“And then?” she asks.

“I’m sure you know,” I say.

“The groupies came,” she says.

I look out the window. The girls are gone. “Yeah,” I say, lifting the fork full of red strings, pulling them loose from their knots. “That’s pretty much it.”

She calls later in the night, when I’m laying in bed, the ceiling fan spinning, sweat dripping off my forehead.

I set up the call recorder.

I love your voice.

Say something mean.

“Hey,” I say.

“So, the part where I explain about the dead women hanging in Pickton’s barn,” she starts. “Am I supposed to be turned on for that?”

I sit up, easing back on the bed, crossing my legs. “What’s your gut instinct?”

She sighs. Paper crinkles and I imagine her sitting back on her own bed, white covers, the nightstand clean, maybe with a glass of water. She seems like the type. “I mean, I’m supposed to be playing a woman with a fetish for killers, so I should be turned on by the aftermath of his killings, right?”

Hurt me.

Rape me.

“You’re supposed to be the hybristophiliac,” I say.

“But you wrote the script,” she says. “I want to know what you want.”

Nobody ever asks me what I want.

“Hang on,” I say, flipping the script open to the proper page. I gather a breath, pretending like I’m wearing the Phantom mask. “Pickton’s friend, Lynn Ellingsen, spoke at the trial,” I read. “Recalling seeing the dead body hanging in Pickton’s garage, she testified the following: “This woman that we had picked up — at my eye level was where her feet, like her legs were, I seen red toe nail polish. On this big shiny table, I don’t know what it was, but it was lots of blood and uh, hair, black hair.”

The pages shuffle over the line. Megan’s breath moves. In. Out. In. “I have black hair,” she says.

They aren’t the words written on the script.

“I only ever paint my toes red now,” she continues. Her swallow resonates. My throat tightens. My heart pounds. “It’s a connection,” she says. “Every time I paint my toes, I can’t help but curl them. It’s like I can feel the cold cut of a knife against my flesh. Then the warmth of blood.”

I set the script aside, my jaw hardening. “So you imagine yourself as the victim?”

“No,” she says. “I’m a fly on the wall. I get to see the aftermath without being there.”

“So it’s not about being a victim?” I ask.

“No,” she says. “It’s about seeing it. Really seeing it. Seeing him do it. I can read all the vivid descriptions but the mind always wanders. On TV, we never get to see any other perspective but disgust. I want to see the deliberation, the satisfaction that he gets when he cuts up the body.”

I pause. “You don’t sound turned on.”

“No,” she says. “I’m trying to get you to understand.”

Do whatever you want to me.

“Not me,” she corrects. “Not Megan, but my character, Megan. That’s what she wants.”

I drop my feet off the bed, scrambling for a pen.

“I’d like to meet you with you before recording,” she says.

I seethe.

“It doesn’t need to be at your place,” she says. “It can be in public. Out in the open.”

“You can’t see my face,” I say. “I’d have to wear the mask. I doubt the response would be ideal out in the open.”

A pause. Silence. “It’s just, you know, as an actor I prefer to do a face to face kind of thing.”

“You wouldn’t even see my face so how is talking over the phone any different?”

“I’m sorry,” she says. Pauses. I listen for her breath. It shakes a little. “I just, I’d feel more comfortable if I met you first. I’m not trying to be problematic. I just, I worry about things too, being a woman and all.”

“No,” I say. “It’s okay.”

A silence works over the line. Outside, a car shifts, the headlights cutting across the room, slicing the black with a little white that cuts across the pictures on the walls.

I wanna feel your tongue inside me.

I want to know how big your dick is.

I want you stab a knife through my chest and lick the blood off the blade.

“I understand where you’re coming from,” I say.

It started on Season 1, Episode 7.

Back then, I recorded out of my apartment and I didn’t wear a mask. It was supposed to be fun. I had a beer to loosen up. She had several.

Her name was Mandy and she was a real hybristophiliac. Her favourite serial killer was Richard Ramirez and she showed me the T-shaped tattoo she had below her breast, which mimicked the stab wound of one of Ramirez’s victims. I asked if she might ever regret getting it and she swayed sideways in her seat, laughing, drunk, losing it.

She tried to regain her balance but she wasn’t close enough to the microphone for her voice to register.

“Get closer to the mic,” I said.

“What?”

“You need to get closer to mic, Mandy.”

“Make me.”

“Get closer for the fucking mic.”

She laughed, pressed her lips to the metal. “I like it when you talk dirty.”

I swallowed. I licked my lips, the saliva sound caught in the recording. “We’re not here to talk about me.”

“We could be,” she said, “if you did something bad.”

I straightened in my seat, teeth gritting, palms sweating over the armrests. “I don’t have any interest in talking about anything that I’ve done. I’m interested in knowing why you get off to some pretty sickening things that other men have done.”

“That’s it,” she said. “That’s what I like. The aggression. The build of it. The danger of it.”

“Of anger?”

“Uh huh.”

“And you think I’ll just snap and hurt you? Just like that?”

“You could,” she said. “Nobody else is here.”

“We’re recording right now.”

She laughed again. “I bet the people who listen to this later would be disappointed if you didn’t fly off the handle.”

“You’re drunk,” I said.

She laughed and leaned back, her voice fading. “And you’re a coward.”

I cut off the recording, filled her a glass of water, gave her some time to calm down.

“I’m sorry,” she said after we resumed. “I’m a bad girl. I can’t help it.”

But it was the penultimate episode, the one the fans talked about most on Reddit. Girls flocked to it, wrote stories about it on Wattpad. Then Mandy shared my address on Twitter.

Come get me.

Come find me.

I found another apartment across town.

In the 7-11 parking lot, I park facing the bushes and put on my mask. It feels stupid being out here in the dark, but then a woman walks out of the convenience store with a new pack of cigarettes. Megan. She unwraps the carton and brings one of the smokes to her lips. A flicker of red lights her face before the smoke curls around.

I blink my lights. She approaches.

I roll down the window and unlock the door, but she stands back, waving the smoke away. “I don’t wanna stink up your car.”

“Then don’t smoke.”

“I’m nervous,” she admits. “You’re in your mask. It’s weird.” She pulls her script our of her bag. We read the opening as she finishes, blowing the smoke away in consideration. She reads over the new pages just as well as she improvised them, emotion building toward the nail polish scene.

“I’m trying to get you to understand,” she reads, dropping the butt onto the pavement, running her heel over the embers. She reaches for the door and slips in, slowing her voice, lowering it. “I have empathy. I feel for the people who became victims, but I also want to understand what drove Pickton to do what he did as well.” Her red nails curl over the page. “It’s only fair, don’t you think?”

The eye holes of the mask create a white frame her profile. She bites at her thumbnail and lifts her gaze.

I’m supposed to ask why she empathizes more with the killer than the victims, but then another car pulls into the parking lot. Two girls jump out. Laughing. Shrieking.

I make a fist, crumpling the page.

Megan shifts in her seat. “So, I binged the entire podcast.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She turns to me. “You have an intensity, even with the actors. You could act, if you wanted to.”

“I just read people,” I say.

“That’s what acting is,” she laughs.

I grip at the wheel. “I’m not exactly comfortable with making public appearances. Not now. Not anymore.”

“Because of the fans, or the people who criticize you?”

“I don’t read the criticism.”

“People think you’re a misogynist.”

“Of course they do,” I say. “I know I can get blunt but it’s par for the course. I’m a man. I represent a perspective. Honestly, it just never made any sense, that whole nice guy versus bad boy thing. Fiction, I understand, but when it bleeds into reality and the women still go for the brutes, I just…” I glance at the rearview mirror at the girls in the store, flicking through the magazines beside the counter. “They still confuse me, honestly.”

“It’s kind of like they interview you sometimes,” Megan says.

“They get defencive,” I say, fingers creaking over the wheel.

“Maybe they feel judged,” she says.

“They like being judged. They like feeling weird and obscure. They want to feel special. That’s why they’re all clamouring to be the next guest. That’s why, after Emily, I started getting selective, and why now, I script things. I want it to be about the stories, the murders. I’m just the fucking host.”

“Yeah, but you’re the constant,” she says, and suddenly I wish I was recording her in secret. “You’re the face. You’re the voice. “Even the listeners who don’t like the subject matter have admitted to appreciating your interview style.”

I look at her.

“I went on Reddit.”

“Oh.” The steering wheel creaks again, the soft leather feeling like skin.

“You should ask them what they think of you. Give them a little tease of what they want.”

Get a knife.

Carve something I can feel.

Write something I’ll remember.

“They want me to do some pretty sick things,” I say.

“Isn’t that funny, though, how it makes you more uncomfortable? There’s unexploited shock value in that. I feel like most men have literally no idea what women really think of them. Sexually, anyway. You have a window to that world. You shouldn’t be afraid to open it.”

I shift. “The thing is, I never did anything wrong, or evil, or vile.”

She draws a breath, raises her brows. “Eric Harris never wanted to actually rape a girl. He just wrote about it.”

The seat creaks beneath me. “What?”

“I listened to that episode today,” she says. “It was interesting.”

I liked Emily. Mousy. Quiet. Young. 19.

Season 2, Episode 5.

She listened intently when I asked her questions. Her breathing picked up nicely on the mic. Calm and steady, building when I asked.

The mask intimidated her.

I wondered if she really was into serial killers or if she was more of a Wattpad fan, a fan of the fictional me, the one that sometimes kidnapped girls and brought them to fancy hotel rooms and asked them to be my girlfriend. Sometimes the fictional me tied them up, maybe slapped them in the face once or twice, maybe brutally raped and murdered them and cut their heads off, but he always told them they were pretty.

Emily’s favourite serial killers were the Columbine shooters, though I pointed out to her that they were more terrorists than murderers.

“They still killed people,” she said. “Like a lot.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but they did it for the sake of making a brash statement. They weren’t in it to sadistically harm people.”

“They were hurting,” she said.

“They were angry,” I said.

“Anger is an expression of pain,” she said.

“So what is it? Do you sympathize with their pain or are you sexualizing their anger?

She met my eyes through the holes in the mask. “I mean, I…”

Silence held. I let it push, seconds ticking into an edge. The waves on the screen faded into nothing. She swallowed. I touched the microphone, nudging it aside. I nodded at the empty audio meter on the computer screen.

“The listeners want to hear what you have to say, Emily.”

“I just…I’m sorry.”

“Should I leave this in?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Into the mic.”

She turned. “I don’t know.”

“You ever think that it’s just that carnal idea that men are inherently brutal? Maybe it just touches your lizard brain.”

She shook her head.

“Nobody can hear you,” I said.

“No,” she said, her breath catching. “No, there’s a humanity to it. Humans are social. They just wanted to feel something.”

“What about Eric’s rape fantasy?”

She seized.

“I mean, that’s pretty much standard fodder for Columbine fangirls like you, isn’t it?”

“He never wrote about forcing a woman to have sex with him. Everything they did was about power. Not over women, but over their own feelings of inadequacy.”

“So it’s the weakness,” I said. “That’s what you like?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Well, we’re trying to figure out what you’re into, Emily. It feels like it’s male weakness.”

“I wouldn’t call it weakness,” she clarified.

I eased back.

“You remember when Mandy called you a coward?” she asked.

I moved my hand, adjusted the mask.

“Season 1, episode 7,” Emily said. “She called you a coward and I know you cut the recording. Everybody knows you cut the recording and picked it up where she apologized to you.”

I glanced at the screen, but thankfully she filled the silence.

“I know you felt weak, but that’s the episode that made me a fan. I wish you didn’t cut it. I wish we could have seen you react. I want to know what you did.”

My mouth dried. My tongue swelled. “Why don’t you ask Mandy?”

“I can’t. She’s not online anymore.”

“Maybe she grew up,” I said.

“Maybe you killed her.”

“Why would I kill her?”

“Some people think you retaliated after she doxxed you. We all know your name is Michael, not Mitchell. And I know that you’re going to delete this from the final cut, but we know things about you, Michael, and I bet that scares you a little.” She sat up in her seat, lips to the microphone, her smile curling in wait.

“This podcast wasn’t ever, and will never be about me,” I said.

A girl coughs outside. I get out of bed and peek through the blinds. The girl’s smoking on the curb, looking down at the phone. The scent of marijuana works its way past the open window and I quietly ease the pane closed before locking it, putting the wood in the frame.

She walks back and forth, the little screen lighting up her face.

She’s young enough to be a fan.

I ease back under the covers, pulling my phone close.

I call Megan.

“Sometimes I get nervous,” I tell her.

“You’re a coward,” she says.

“Stop it,” I say, wondering why I’m trusting her, why she’s different.

“You’re not much of an interviewer,” she says.

“I thought you said I had intensity.”

“I said you could act, not that you could interview. Your problem is that you react. You show too many cards.”

I get out of bed again and look out the window but the girl is gone. The streetlights shine through the trees, casting shadows that look like little fingers, hands crawling up the street and the curb. A dog barks in somebody’s yard.

“Are you wearing your mask?” she asks.

“No,” I say.

“You should when you talk to me. There’s power behind it.”

I pick the mask off my nightstand and put her on speaker phone, adjusting it over my face.

“I like you.” Her voice works against the walls, slithers through the acoustics of the room even though she’s not here.

“Me too,” I say, “but I don’t date fans.”

“I’m not a fan,” she says.

“You sure act like one.”

“I’m helping you,” she insists. “The other episodes with actresses? They’re not as good.”

She’s not the only one who’s shared this opinion.

“So you think you can give me input,” I say.

“You already took some,” she says. “You obviously liked it. You saw me back in February and it took you five months to get up the nerve to hire me. Now you’re calling me in the middle of the night.”

“Maybe I just like hearing your voice,” I say, moving about the house, pacing now.

I open the fridge and pull out a beer. I twist the cap off and the carbonation whispers out.

“You should come over instead of drinking that,” she says.

“Why?”

“Because I’m just laying here in my bed in some sexy lingerie. We could make it a little 90s-style true crime reenactment. Just for fun.”

I sigh.

“Or,” she continues, “you can bring your script and we can do a little dress rehearsal in my kitchen.”

“That’s a bad idea,” I say.

“You want it to be a bad idea,” she says.

I stare at the open bottle, the cold drink inside chilling my hand. All it ever takes it one bottle to soothe the nerves.

Take me.

Deal with me.

“Mitchell?” she asks. “Are you there?”

Jessie was the 4th actress.

Season 3, Episode 4.

She wasn’t a good actress. She read her lines properly but she didn’t read me all that well.

“Do you think that maybe your obsession with Jeffrey Dahmer is more of an attempt to seem edgy or different?” I asked.

She stared down at the script and shook her head.

“People can’t see you, Jessie,” I reminded her.

“Oh,” she said. “No.”

“But you post pictures of him on your blog,” I said. “You try to make him seem human.”

“He was human. He had insecurities. He didn’t even have sex until he was 25.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“He—”

“Because it sounds like you’re trying to excuse his behaviour, just like everyone else.”

She looked down at the page again and sighed. “He looks so sad in all the pictures. I feel like he was confused. I feel like if somebody just loved him, that maybe things would be different.”

She started crying. The script never told her to cry.

“What are you doing?” The script never told me to ask that either, but her improvisation was worth working with. She frantically looked back at the page, then at me, at the mask. The pages fluttered, showed up on the meter.

“I just, I get really emotional.”

“Jeffrey Dahmer didn’t murder your brother, or your son, a person who actually mattered—”

“No, but, people just don’t understand.”

“Don’t understand you?” I asked. “Why are you trying to make his actions seem normal when you’re the one who’s being abnormal here?”

“Because we’re all human,” she said. Sniffed. “I think it’s right to understand why people do the things they do.”

“Nobody said you had to fall in love with him.”

“You can’t help those things. They’re deeper. They made no sense sometimes.”

“So you’re telling me that you can’t explain yourself? Why the fuck are you even here?”

She sniffed again, looking up. She blinked, her face paling, her fingers wringing around the script, the words meaning nothing now.

Scared.

“You asked me to come,” she said. Whimpered.

You’re so hot when you swear.

Your angry voice is so sexy.

Tie me up and say that.

The fans ate it up.

Megan lives an in apartment. With cameras. I refuse to go in so she comes out, meets me down the road where I’ve parked. We read the script by flashlight. She’s in denim shorts and a linen t-shirt. The alley shadows creep over her bare legs and between her thighs.

“Robert Pickton isn’t an attractive man,” she reads. “It’s more about the situation he abused, how he managed to take advantage of people in dire situations. He groomed them, drugged them, made their testimonies mean nothing.”

She shifts the script, draws my eye.

“It’s almost that billionaire fantasy,” she says. “He had a farm. Property. A place to hide not just himself but his actions. That’s what power is, isn’t it?”

“Well, I guess.”

“Most women like serial killers who invade others’ homes,” she continues.

“There’s nothing inherently sexy about that. Pickton invited people in. He made them feel special.”

Force your fingers inside of me.

Take me by the throat.

Push until I stop screaming.

She shifts. Scoffs.

“What?” I ask.

“This doesn’t exactly read authentic.”

“What do you mean?”

“It reads like a man’s attempt at writing a women who’s being authentic.”

The shadows crawl along the flowers on her top, beneath the v-neckline, along her exposed neck. I swallow. She notices, her lips parting when I avert my eyes.

“Women can be shallow, too,” she says. “I’m sure most of these serial killer fangirls are being shallow. The hybristophilia part is just… I don’t know, an evolution of that shallowness.”

My hand slips from the steering wheel. “Could a woman actually be into Robert Pickton?”

“I don’t see why not. Different women are attracted to different qualities.” She laughs. “Maybe my character has a farm kink.”

I pull out a pen, click on the end and hand it to her. “Put it in. Put something in.”

She smiles. “Seriously? What do I write?”

“Something about rolling around in the mud. I don’t know. I trust you.”

She takes the pen and I give her the other sheet of paper I brought.

“What’s this?”

“A non-disclosure agreement. Everyone signs them.”

She glances over the page. A breeze slips through the crack in the car window. A whistle.

“You should take your mask off,” she says.

“Why?”

“So I have something to not disclose.”

I turn to her, elbow on the wheel, hand on the gearshift. She notices my gaze slip down to her thigh. She clicks the pen, lifts her knee to sign the line at the bottom of the page.

She hands it back to me and slips the mask off my face.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi,” she says.

I curl my finger beneath her chin, leaning in slowly, gently.

I kiss her the way nobody has ever asked me to.

The ceiling fan spins on high, casting a wavering shadow on the bedroom ceiling. It’s unbalanced. The lamp cover shakes off the motor housing. Megan slides her hand over my arm.

“So, are you going to give me a ride home, or should I walk outside in the dark?”
My apartment building has no cameras.

It’s old.

It’s dated.

Take me somewhere where nobody will hear me scream.

Her hand drifts to my bare chest, firm, pressing down. She sits up, her black hair slipping over her tits.

“You can stay.”

She leans further over me, fingers pushing my ribs, prodding. She smiles and I take her wrist, wrestling her balance. She topples and I grab her biceps. The heat of her gasped breath touches my forehead, my brow, the parts of my face that the mask usually covers.

“You’re just a regular guy,” she says.

“Yeah, I know. Nothing special.”

I only get turned on when I think of you holding a knife to my throat.

“Your dick’s pretty average.”

Fuck me.

Kill me.

“The Golden State Killer had a small dick,” I say.

“He actually murdered people, though.”

You’re so fucking hot.

“I feel like you’re just saying these things to provoke me.”

“You get easily provoked.” She leans further, pushing against my restraint.

I shift my hand upward, my palm sticking to the sweat on her collarbone. No shadows. Just sunlight and skin. I reach up, slipping my fingers against the tender flesh of her throat. She gasps a little. She smiles more.

“See?” Her throat tenses. Her voice warbles.

I sit up and push her back. She struggles to catch a breath and I wrestle her down on the foot of the bed. She goes willingly, her limbs loose. She doesn’t fight.

I want to feel your muscles clenching.

I wanna feel your girth inside me.

I can’t help but cringe. Wiping the sweat from my brow, I shift and turn away. “Honestly, Megan, this isn’t who I am.”

She breathes in. Sits up. “That’s the problem. You’re not giving the fans what they want.”

“I’m just trying to tell the truth,” I say.

“Nobody wants to hear it,” she says. “You keep trying to change them and not you.”

“What, so you’re on their end now? Are you trying to lose your job?”

She laughs. “There’s always another job.”

My fist forms. My lungs fill with air.

Cut me.

Torture me.

“They’re all fucking crazy,” I say.

“Yeah,” she says, nodding. “That’s what you’re trying to exploit.”

“I’m not trying to exploit it.”

She scoffs again. “You have sponsors and ads. You profit. Off them. Your fans.”
She stands, picking up the script from the pile of clothes on the floor. She tosses the pages over my lap. “You need real perspectives. Not yours. What’s funny is that they’re begging to fucking talk to you and you won’t even give them the time of day.”

She stands at the foot of the bed and pulls her shirt on, pulls her hair through the neckline. The long black locks slip down over her shoulders. I press my fingers against my eye sockets and rub until the black mutates.

Make me your Black Dahlia.

“You’re right,” I say.

She comes closer, sits beside me again. She picks up the script but we both know already that neither of us will be reading it.

My Patrons often send me direct messages. I never answer them anymore.

Only once did one fan ever not sign her real name.

Dear Mitchell,

I read on Reddit that you started scripting episodes of Dear Murderer and that you’ve been hiring actresses to play the roles of real hybristophiliacs. It’s dishonest and wrong and it hurts. I used think you really wanted to know us, but you’re just another asshole.

Please tell me judging this isn’t true.

I wish you could try.

I want you to try.

I’d gladly let you stick a knife into my brain.

Let me be your first.

– MitchelFan4ever

Megan sits across from me at the dining room table.

We’re back in my apartment. I twist the cap off a bottle of beer, take a sip and set it on the desk before putting my headphones in. I start recording. We banter. I introduce her and we recite the script, somewhat from memory, but more from something else.

“I realize that most of the fan-favourite killers are dead, but why send fan letters to Robert Pickton?” I ask. “I don’t often hear of him receiving fan mail.”

“He sure got some fan mail from me,” she reads. Laughs.

The laugh isn’t in the script but it’s a part of who she is. Not just her character, but the piece of her that she brought to me.

“Has he ever responded?” I ask.

“No, of course not.”

“Maybe he’s not the type to respond to fans.”

“You mean, like you?” she asks.

I glance down at the page.

“I’m improvising,” she says. She smirks, turning to the computer screen, where the waves build. “I just want you to hear this, okay? You can cut it if you want, but you probably shouldn’t.”

I make a fist but I adjust my microphone instead. “Megan—”

“My favourite killer is Ted Bundy,” she says.

I swallow, lips firming. My breath escapes through flared nostrils.

The waveforms wither on the screen. Breathing In and out. Hers and mine. I can stop this. Stop it from happening.

Again.

Unlike the others, she’s a good actress. She could fix it her attitude, her choices, her fucking demeanour.

I glance at the mouse.

“Don’t cut it,” she says.

The waveforms continue. Tiny. Inconsequential. But my heartbeat pounds in my head. In my skull. I swallow again. I tighten my fist again. I try to draw a breath but my lungs are already full.

I adjust the mask.

I’d love to be your first victim.

She nods.

Nobody sees it but me.

Please.

My beer sits open, getting warm. “You were a fan before I met you.” My voice wavers. “You’re just like the rest of them.”

“Not anymore,” she says. “I’m here. I’m in your apartment. We went on a date, Michael.”

“Mitchell,” I correct.

“You hire actresses, Michael. You write scripts so you can control them. So you can be the one in power.”

I shift the microphone. “We’re not here to disclose the details of your charade, Megan.”

“I know what you look like without the mask,” she says. “I know what you feel like inside of me.”

The fan in the bedroom starts rattling again. Goosebumps prickle my skin, little needles. Prodding. Hurting. Making my skin tight.

“You fuck like a coward,” she says.

I firm my gasp over the table. “No—”

“You want somebody to understand you.”

Choke me.

Rape me.

“You’re flummoxed by us. You have no control.”

My breaths grow, the red bars increasing. “I don’t give a shit about any of you.”

She laughs again, presses her lips to the mic.

I need to be your first.

Make me your first.

My hands shake over the table. The script shifts. The ceiling fan throbs, spinning hot air.

She stares at me, at my masked face, which doesn’t unnerve her, not the way it should.

“You’re just a regular guy,” she says again.

I pick up the beer bottle. I stand and take a sip. The fan blades cut like my heartbeat.

She slips back in her chair and licks her lips. Inhales.

I brace my sweaty palm around the bottle. Another sip. I set it down, adjusting my grasp around the bottle’s neck. The eyeholes in the mask become frames again. Bitterness. Weight.

“You want me to choke you?” I ask. “Like before?”

She exhales.

She shakes her head.

“Nobody can see you,” I say. “Talk into the fucking mic.”

Her throat catches. She gasps. She leans in, obeys like they all do.

I lift the bottle and swing it against her cheek. Her face snaps to the side, the glass hitting bone. Beer spills. The lukewarm liquid slips down my skin, sticky on my arms. It drips off the goosebumps and spills to the floor.

She slips out of the chair a little, the wheels shifting beneath her compromised weight. She staggers back, gripping the armrests, her feet slipping as the wheels coast her backward. I trip over her leg. The beer bottle smashes against the floor. The neck remains intact, leaving a circle of jagged glass.

“Please,” she gasps.

She pulls the mic off the table, pulling down the equipment. I imagine the recording, the levels blowing.

The broken bottle warms in my grasp. The glass sinks into her arm, cutting skin, splitting red.

She screams, flails, reaches for the side of the desk, pulling wires, pulling the script.

“You pretended to like me,” I seethe. “You fucking lied.”

She moans again.

Tell me I’m a slut.

Tell me I’m a bitch.

Tell me I mean nothing to you.

“Don’t you fucking like this?”

She doesn’t act like she should. Her voice breaks and she pushes at my chest, sinks a nail into my jaw, tries to pry the mask off again. It shifts over my face and blinds reality. White. Surrender. The words crawl through my limbs, my fingers, turning the digits rigid. I lift my arm up and down, the glass an extension, slipping deep, slipping right into her throat, cutting it open, vocal cords severed like strands of spaghetti.

Hurt me.

Maim me.

The unbalanced fan bangs even harder.

Ruin me.

Make me yours.

The beat in her body fades into nothing, but the fan deafens. The glass cover of the light wobbles against the screws.

Even without the mic, my breath makes lapping waves on the screen. They grow. They build as I reach for the mic on the floor. I pick it up. I heave, frantic, angry, unbalanced.

I move the mouse and cut the recording.

The final episode of Season 3.

I’m going to have to get a new apartment.

Dear Fans,

I’ve read your mail and I choose to listen.

For season 4 of Dear Murderer, I plan on taking the show on the road.

Please send me your stories.

I will read all of them. I will contact 10 of you. I will visit 10 of you.

Tell me why you should be one of the Lucky 10.

Best,

Michael