Poppy Z. Brite

Exquisite Corpse

Aimee :)

My name is Andrew Compton. Between 1977 and 1988 1 killed twenty-three boys and young men in London. I was seventeen years old when I began, twenty-eight when they caught me. All the time I was in prison, I knew that if they ever let me out I would continue killing boys. But I also knew they would never let me out.

it was the subtle whisper and slice of the razor that appealed to me. I liked my boys as they were, big dead dolls with an extra weeping crimson mouth or two.

I began to write about the things that interested me now. I found myself with a great many descriptions of murders and sex acts performed upon dead boys. Small details began to return to me, such as the way a fingerprint would stay in the flesh of a corpse's thigh as if pressed into wax, or a cold thread of semen would sometimes leak out of a flaccid penis as I rolled it about on my tongue.

My hands itched for the blade, for the warmth of fresh blood, for the marble smoothness of flesh three days dead.

For the first time in five years I had a beautiful dead boy at my disposal, and there wasn't a damned thing I could do about it.

No one would guess I had already killed two men today, and meant to do a third. But that was the whole point, wasn't it?

But if he could still see me, I wanted him to know I wasn't doing this because I hated him. Quite the contrary. Before, I had only seen him as a means to an end. But in these final moments of his life, I loved him.

Jay smiled. The boy smiled back. He had to; most of the flesh around his mouth had been scraped or burned away, and his smile was a rictus of bleach-white teeth set in bleeding gums.

Luke hated the world because it would go on after he was dead.

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