He preferred killing at night.

This seemed the "right time" for death.

He also liked riding the trains at night. Night trains were exhilarating. The way they screamed along, banshee-like, approximated a kind of musical score befitting the scene. The extras were thinned out, stretched out over the train at night, and the stations were pretty barren. One might call it Nightmare on El(m) Train, he thought with a heaving, internal chuckle, pleased with himself. The set was eerie, befitting a tale of terror. Same old blood-warm scene in which somebody's got to pay up in the end.

Desperate hours, nighttime hours. A time when desperate men walked forth. He wanted to make himself feel some of that, to be a feeling animal, to have his blood pressure rise, his temple pound with excitement, his glands spurting out juices of feeling into his veins. Make me feel something, anything! Feeling feeds it.

He thought: Make me central to the weave and plot of life, to feel reason and logic and pattern even if reason means bloodletting, logic means sacrificial bodies, and pattern means paying homage to some vague ancestral hunger. Make these things have a place in an unreasonable, illogical, patternless world.

He cast himself in the role of a death-wielding, modern-day desperado, a Jesse James of the A train, a Billy the Kid of the city rails. Bernhard Goetz, move over, he thought, a smirk marking his face. Except he knew his intentions were intentionless, his motives motiveless, his "mission" a non-mission; it was all for one thing alone--self-indulgement. Not that he felt gratified looking at the man in the seat beside him with a knife sticking from his abdomen. He'd held the man in shock as he bled to death. He was a middle-aged Hispanic who'd been reading a paper when he sat beside him, asking him for a quarter. The man shooed him off as if he were a fly. His eyes bulged in horror and amazement when the knife was thrust into his large gut.

The killer pressed the newspaper over the bloody wound, held the man down with surprising strength, and watched his life sap away.

"Power trip," he whispered in the Hispanic's ear.

There were people ahead of them in the train, any one of which could have been his victim, any one of which might have won the dark lottery he proposed. And there were a handful of people behind them. The Hispanic tried to call for help but only got out a garbled gurgling before a gloved hand was clamped over his mouth. With his other hand he turned out the man's wallet and took the cash he found there, along with credit cards. It would look like a simple homicide-robbery. It would get their attention, but they had no idea that it was just the beginning.

Sweat was causing his eyes to scald with makeup and itching. The bag-man clothes he wore, the gloves, worked against him in the oppressive Chicago heat below ground, in a subway car where the air-conditioning was feeble at best.

But the killing mind quickly put out thoughts of discomfort, telescoping to the accomplishment which took precedence over all else, blotted out other considerations, including the preteen girl traveling with her parents far to the front whose eyes studied the posture and sudden distortion of the face on the Hispanic. The killer was absorbed in what he had come for, the thrill of the experience, to be able to feel the razor's edge of ecstasy that came only with such an act of courage, for it took an intense bravery to do it this way.

A far-out trip, a far cry from the petty crimes of his youth. He had graduated to the very highest plateau of corruption and it suited him, felt right in his soul. Justification, if you will, he thought, grinning, his mask of a face in stark contrast to the open-mouthed dead man on the seat beside him.

This was a real high high!

He now had what he'd come for. He had elicited it from the experience. No reason, no logic, no pattern. Pattern killers were fools. He was no fool. In fact, he was far more intelligent than anyone he knew, and the world at large. What an experience.

Deep within himself a dark creature fed on his deed. Feeding his newfound companion was his only reward and his only motivation--if there was a motive at all. He had lived his life a liar and a thief, his childhood a joke and an insult. He had grown up on the streets and had raised himself from the Chicago cesspool, becoming a successful conman. His scams were fantastic by the time he was a young man, and for many years they were enough to appease him. He had talked hundreds of thousands of dollars off the fingers and necks of the rich, men included. But one night one of his scams went awry and he had to kill a woman. At first aghast with fear, he meticulously covered his tracks, and as he did so, he became smug and cocky and suddenly pleased with himself. He found he liked it. It opened up new challenges, new territory to conquer, and at the same time, strangely enough, a brainload of old feelings of abandonment, want, and hunger. Complex ideas began to come to him. Emotions so powerful as to feed upon themselves. Power he'd not had for years. Now he was a murderer. A cold-blooded murderer, except that it didn't make his blood run cold. On the contrary, it came to a boil of excruciatingly painful and delightful heat. It was better than sex. He was a killer of a most unusual sort. Not a gunman for hire, not a hit man for the mob, just a simple powermonger, a "big" player in the nursery. He had become the kind of nightmare that frightened him as a homeless child.

He was secure in himself for the first time, ever; he'd gained self-knowledge! There was no plan other than the steps he took to prepare for a role, the weapon or weapons he might select, the number on the front of the train, the "lottery" of death he proposed to run. There was no looking beyond the night's work. There were no doubts, questions, or wondering. There was only the feeding. Simple as that. No sense of mission, no reasons for his actions, no motive. He knew they'd be looking for a motive. He knew an army of detectives and psychiatrists and criminologists would be "making up" motive. All great criminal cases had a motivational factor, the authorities believed, even Lizzie Borden and Jack the Ripper had to have had motive! Or so they had to believe, wanted to believe, because with motive you get purpose, and with purpose sense could be made of the most horrendous butchery but--

But sometimes there was no accounting ... except perhaps an invisible and unknown factor, a blood or genetic thing, or a furl in the brain that ought not really to be there, or, like him, something inside that had to be fed.

Yet, he'd still have to feed the craving, scratch the itch, reply to the urge since he was weak, and fate had dealt him an impoverished sense of moral character. He had long ago accepted these facts, long before his now-newfound demon. Whether the demon was brain spawned or hell spawned and sent to plague him with a lust for killing, didn't, in the end, really matter a whit, now, did it?

No ... not a wit. But life was not simple. It was a mad, out-of-control proliferation of horror brought about by purposeless life, and life feeding on life. Survival, adaption, mutation, survival, adaption, mutation; and in the end, perhaps he was the survivor and the sheep, like the Hispanic in the seat next to him, was the mutation after all. Life was a party. Be happy. Enjoy. What he was doing was all for fun. It invigorated and rejuvenated his psyche and left him physically at peace, able to sleep and eat, work and play. It had become play, and the play's the thing.

He lumbered up from his seat, an old man with white whiskers and a toothless mouth, gums bobbing, an unlikely warrior. He left the knife purposefully in the other passenger. He wanted them to find it there. He wanted them to waste money, manpower, and hours trying to make something of it, trying to understand that which could never be understood, not now, not in a million years.

He rubbed an itch at his temple, and some of the greasepaint from around his white eyebrows smeared onto the glove. The train came to a screeching halt at Irving Park. He disembarked, paying no particular attention to the station sign, and watched the train with its death car disappear into the night. By the time they found the corpse, they'd have no idea of when, where, how, who, and since there truly was no why, they'd never know the why of it, even if they could learn the who of it.

He eyeballed a kissy couple on the platform across from him who paid him no heed whatsoever. He ambled down the stairs and made his way across. The shaky old man, limp and all, decided to make his way toward home via a circuitous route that would start with the opposite track, where he could stand alongside the kissy teens. See what developed, maybe make it a double or even a triple-header tonight, maybe not...

It all depends, he thought wearily. He was, after all, an old man, and the bones were not as agile as they used to be, and although he had another knife on his person, he'd much prefer to mix it up a bit. Two knifings in one night on the same train route was not a good idea. But then, if the temptation overcame him, he knew that such caution meant nothing.

The beast within was unshackled, and it dictated where, not him. If the beast wished to play...