The Executioner's Heart

CHAPTER 4

It wasn’t that she enjoyed killing.

Indeed, she took no pleasure whatsoever in the act. The sensation of her sword tip sliding into the soft flesh of a target; the spurt of crimson blood as she severed their vital arteries; the expression of terrified anguish on their face as it dawned on them that their final moments would be spent writhing in agony, impotent to prevent their own demise … none of these things elicited even the slightest hint of emotion in her.

Indeed, it was this utter and complete absence of feeling that had led her to the role of murderess, mercenary, executioner. She had long ago lost her heart. Now, she was little more than a cipher, a shadow, a leftover trace of the person she had once been. She was undying and immoveable.

She still remembered the first time she had killed. She expected to be overwhelmed with disgust, horror, remorse. She imagined she would vomit and keen into the long nights in the weeks that followed, that she would vehemently hate herself for what she had done and be unable to reconcile her actions with her understanding of herself.

As she sat in the darkness planning every detail of the momentous act-where it would take place, at what time, with what weapon-she quietly accepted that she would be crossing a line she could never return from. Her motive might have been revenge, but in killing the man who had created her-who had turned her into a monster-she would also be killing something inside of herself. By carrying out this act of violence she would inadvertently be continuing his work, and finally giving up the last of her humanity.

She came to this realization as she lay in wait for the man, two curved blades clutched in her fists. The room was silent other than the incessant ticking of the clock on the mantel, measuring the seconds until he would arrive home and the deed could be done.

Everything had unfolded as she’d anticipated. The man stumbled in drunk at close to eleven o’clock. He fumbled to light a candle to guide his way. As the flame took hold of the wick and cast his face in sharp relief, she stepped out from behind the open door and slid the first blade through his belly.

Even now, she could see the look of absolute confusion on his face, how it slowly transformed to an expression of horror and desperation as he realised what was happening, and how the sorrowful realisation finally dawned in his eyes as the second blade bit home, piercing his heart and causing his body to convulse and fall limp to the floor.

She knelt over him as he faded, her breath coming in short, quick gasps. She waited for the welling feeling of loss, for the panic, for the burning shame. Perhaps even for the relief or the exhilaration that she had finally taken her revenge. But none of this came.

At first she rationalised this absence as shock; that the immediacy of what had occurred had rendered her numb, that everything else would follow later. Yet the only thing she felt as she crouched over the corpse of the man who had created her, watching his blood seep from the horrific gashes in his torso, was an acute sense of curiosity.

She had lived a lifetime since that day in Montmartre in 1826. Almost eighty years. Yet it was still vivid in her memory, like an old, stubborn stain that refused to be scrubbed away.

The next death followed a week later, driven by that same intense sense of curiosity: a need to discover whether there was any part of her that could still feel. This time it was a stranger, and she discovered that the fact that she did not know the person, did not understand their hopes, fears, and desires, made no difference to her whatsoever.

A string of murders throughout the streets of Paris had followed, but nothing she did-no matter the means of death, the condition in which she left the bodies, the manner in which she allowed them to beg or scream-could touch her.

She understood that this was not normal, that the people who found the corpses she’d left strewn across the cobbled streets in her wake were disgusted by what they saw. She read the newspaper reports about the hunt to find the killer, who the reporters had dubbed “the Scourge of Paris” or “the Executioner,” how the city’s populace cowered in fear that this shadowy killer might come for them in the night. She recognised the impact of her actions, but found herself entirely unable to care.

For a while after her murderous spree, she joined a travelling troupe of acrobats (for she had always been athletic), quitting Paris and touring from city to city across the continent. This had proved to be a distraction, for a time, but it did not last. She grew tired of being dragged from one unfamiliar town to another, and the initial lustre of a life on the road was soon eroded by the weariness in her bones and the emptiness where her heart had once been. She longed to have her pulse quicken with excitement, to feel alive.

One night after a show, she happened across one of the acrobats cursing and thrashing about her caravan in a blind rage. Earlier that day, the acrobat had discovered her lover rutting with another of the girls from the troupe. When confronted, he had simply laughed and carried on.

The girl begged her to help, and together they plotted vengeance through the night. The next day, the acrobat woke to find her lover’s heart on the pillow beside her. The girl never spoke a word about it to anyone.

The Executioner-a name she had embraced by this time-fled to evade discovery. But still she felt no sense of triumph, of fulfilment. There was nothing but a void in her soul, a deep sense of emptiness at the core of her being.

She had not sought this strange, nomadic existence, but it found her regardless, drawing her in-out of necessity, perhaps, and as a result of her dispassion. She had fallen into this life because she didn’t care enough not to, and because, in some ways, she was still searching, still hoping to find that glimmer of a reaction in the empty space where her own heart had been.

She held her breath as the door opened. Her next victim had arrived.