The flesh parted beneath the blade, the warm blood still gently flowing out, propelled by the residual pressure in the arteries. He licked his lips with pleasure. As delightful as explosions and burning could be, dismemberment was always his favourite form of body disposal. It had such a…sensual appeal.
Of course, he normally didn't engage in such things as he needed to stay above suspicion, but the craving for the kill had come upon him. And when Moriarty craved death, death came like a summoned demon.
The boy had been called Wiggins, not that it mattered. Such a tender thing, a child. Such gentle flesh and unsullied blood. Oh, yes, to kill a woman of ill repute was one thing, but this unloved child, living on the streets, stealing for food, Moriarty knew that it was just the ticket.
"I'm Jim," he said to the lifeless face. He smiled wickedly. "But then I don't suppose that matters now." The sharp scalpel made an incision from the boy's left ear to his right. Moriarty did this slowly, deliberately, enjoying every last instant that he touched the crimson liquid. He always worked with bare hands, which he would sanitize later (he was many things, but stupid was not among them).
Moriarty reached the point where the knife would no longer suffice, and he grabbed his pruning shears to slice through the trachea and spine. An inhuman giggle escaped his lips as the head of poor Wiggins fell to the floor. The face rolled to look up at him, and he began to speak to it.
"See what I can do? And no one will ever find you because I'll be careful. I'm always so careful." Limb by limb, he cut through the skin and muscle and tendon with his scalpel before using the shears for the final separation.
"You should consider yourself lucky," he told his work as he removed the boy's liver and placed it in one of his nicest dinner bowls. "Most people I kill don't get to see me first. They don't even know who I am." He grinned. "But not you. I was kind enough to give you the opportunity to see my face before you died." His grin grew more sinister. "Was that candy delicious? I hope you enjoyed it. It was the last Hershey bar I had." He frowned, childishly. "Now I'll have to buy another box."
The twinkle in his eyes was nightmarish. He took exceptional pleasure in holding the boy's heart in his bare hands, caressing the aortic valve, sticking his fingers in and closing his eyes as he felt all the valves and knowing that he had stopped them.
"It's almost too easy," he remarked. "Give a vagrant a candy bar laced with cyanide and he can't help but eat it." He sighed with the pleasure of the memory. "The look on your face as you died…exquisite."
He continued his work, reducing the body of a child into a pile of flesh and bone. He'd left the head intact, as the face of his victim was the one thing he could not bear to destroy. Not out of sentiment for the person, but because he delighted in the expressions of the dead. He ran his fingers along the exposed eyeballs of the boy. He sighed an almost sexual sigh at the sensation.
"What a curious shade of brown," he remarked in a whisper. "Like Surrey mud."
He put all of the body remnants in a bag specially made by him for the purpose and began to work on the head. He liked to embalm the head with his own special recipe, and preserve it. He had a number of heads on a shelf in his secret closet, and he would talk to them when he needed to plan. It was a release.
"And now, my dear, we wait for the call. He's working, I can almost hear it in my mind. I'm going to check in on him today," he added as he stuffed the trachea, his tongue between his lips. "See how he's getting along."
When he was done, he held the head up to the light. He brushed his fingertips along the cheek of the dead child, played with the hair, and whispered his approval of his own work. Standing up, he picked the head up and carried it back to his secret closet and put it beside the head of a blonde woman and that of an elderly man. They all shared similar expressions of terror, as did the other five heads on the shelf.
"I'll be back later, don't fret," he said with a sinister grin. "I just need to go to the hospital to see how Sherlock Holmes is getting along." He made a kissy-face at the heads. "Oh, I know you're not going anywhere. You're so loyal!"
He picked a grey shirt, a pair of light brown trousers, and, very deliberately, a choice of underwear with a green waistband, and got dressed and ready for his role as Jim from IT, the might-be-gay boyfriend of Molly Hooper.