9h (edited) • Davi's Stuff
from "The Panchira Protocol"
Here's the backstory of my favorite serial killer, driven to kill by obnoxious noises.
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Felix had found the source of the annoying noise. It was coming from the shed outside. The idiots that ran this place must have had a generator in there and were using it to power the lights. In Felix’s opinion, the din was not worth the light. There was no excuse for such a racket. The clattering engine noises ricocheted between the peeling walls of the institution and the warped walls of Felix’s mind. Were it not for the risk of more noises assaulting him outside, he’d have marched out to the shed and shut the thing off. The lights be damned. He found those annoying too, with the incandescent bulbs emitting the high-frequency buzz of a hovering mosquito. No, darkness was Felix’s friend. And darkness came with another of his friends, his best friend, in fact – peace. The man wanted nothing more than to silence every source of sound that violated his peace.
The science people had raked over his psyche after his killing spree to identify a triggering event that set him off. Had someone subjected him to an awful, torturous noise as a child? Perhaps as punishment? Or sick abuse? There was no such event.
As he found most sounds irritating, and human sounds more irritating than most, Felix grew into something of a hermit after his teen years. He took jobs that kept him away from crowds, such as night security patrol, or cleaning office buildings, again at night. His daily routine centred around the avoidance of noise, and thus the avoidance of its usual source - people.
This included buying his groceries either when the supermarket first opened in the morning, or just before it closed at night. Felix survived a long time with this lifestyle; well into his thirties. Until everything came crashing down during one of these shopping trips. Unable to find an empty cashier, he’d had to wait behind a lady buying wine. Drunk already, she’d launched into a tirade against the poor serving girl. Felix wasn’t sure of the detail. The cashier was either asking for ID or refusing to serve her; he didn't care. All he cared about was the assault on his mental equilibrium when the mad customer started screeching her indignation.
Felix clamped both hands to his ears and squatted low, beside the counter, desperate to block the invasion of sound.
And something deep inside him broke.
All the sounds he’d blocked during his years of meticulous avoidance came crashing through his brain in one gigantic cacophonous tsunami. In anguish, he rose to his feet, grabbed the bottle of wine from the still screeching banshee – and smashed it over her head.
The awful din ceased as the woman slumped to the floor like the proverbial sack of potatoes. Felix had a fleeting second to enjoy the peace he’d created before shouts erupted around him. He clapped his hands back to his ears and stumbled from the shop, out into the night.
Before the sun rose the following morning, more noisy people would die.
Sirens wailed in the distance, responding to the supermarket incident. Felix’s mind screamed at the new sound as he ran on, mouth agape and contorted by the phonic torture. The world would not shut up and leave him in peace, even for a second.
Up ahead, a car horn blared. He was upon it in seconds, yanking open the door and pulling the hapless driver out by his collar. Felix spun him around and threw him under an oncoming inter-city bus. Somewhere a woman shrieked, punctuating the sharp hiss of the bus’s air brakes and sending Felix off in another direction.
Two blocks further on, brought him to the entertainment district. A hapless busker was making a meal of Hotel California with a cheap microphone and battery powered amp. Stunned onlookers were too slow to react as Felix leapt on the man and wrapped the microphone cord around his neck. By the time some brave people were hauling him off – the busker was dead.
Five minutes later Felix sat cuffed in the back of a police car, mumbling, “I’ll give you fucking pink champagne on ice.”
When criminal psychiatrists unraveled his motives, the papers dubbed him: “The Silencer.” He liked that. And he liked the place they’d imprisoned him in. This place, the Johann Reill Institute. It offered the quietest environment he’d ever had to endure.
But now, something was amiss. All this commotion threatened his peace and tranquillity, and The Silencer was most displeased.
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from "The Panchira Protocol"
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