Author's notes: Here's some gore for the gore fans.
The apartment was pleasantly furnished. It was quite modern. A black leather couch sat in front of a chrome coffee table. An entertainment center of polished black metal served as home to expensive electronics: a wide-screen TV, a stereo, and a DVD player. The apartment's tenant, Jeremy Thornton, did well as a mutual-fund advisor. Professor Creed was impressed with how his former student had done in post-collegiate life.
But that didn't mean he didn't have some business to settle with him. No, Professor Creed had long regretted that he hadn't taken care of Thornton when he'd had the chance. But that was no matter. Discovering that Jeremy Thornton now lived in the city that Professor Creed and Susana Alvarez Lecter were hiding out in was a welcome plus.
Jeremy Thornton was not a tall man, standing five foot seven. He was quite elegant and neat. He wore an expensive white shirt, a tie of brilliant red silk, dark gray suit pants and wing tips. His jacket was behind him on the couch. He was young to be so well dressed, but that wasn't surprising given his job.
It seemed Jeremy wasn't terribly happy to see his former professor. He was lying on the floor as the professor loomed over him. Susana stood behind him, watching intently as the professor dealt with the old matters that he was now able to take care of. Jeremy didn't seem particularly happy to be lying on his carpeted floor. Unfortunately, his wrists were tied tightly behind his back and his ankles bound together, leaving him no choice but to stare up at Professor Creed. His mouth was sealed with a wide swath of duct tape.
"Hello, Jeremy," Professor Creed said calmly, and removed his glasses. He touched one earpiece to his lips and sat down comfortably in Jeremy's office chair.
"Jeremy, I know it's been a while since we last met," Professor Creed said calmly. He reached for his suit pocket with one hand and removed a Spyderco Civilian. A long, curving, wicked knife, made as a last-ditch self-defense weapon for undercover agents. Jeremy Thornton's wide eyes tracked the knife carefully. Sweat glistened on his brow.
"I'd like to talk to you, Jeremy," Professor Creed continued. "However, I must be assured that you won't scream. Can you agree to not scream if I remove that tape from your mouth?"
Slowly, trying to fight the panic that ruled him, Jeremy Thornton nodded.
"Very good. Now make sure you keep your word. If you don't, Jeremy, then I'll have to use this knife. I do not possess a medical degree, as does my…companion here. But I assure you I have enough practical experience to ensure that screaming would result in consequences…most unpleasant."
Jeremy Thornton's eyes were locked on his captor's. He nodded once to show he understood.
"I'll trust you, Jeremy," Professor Creed said. "Don't disappoint me. You already have once, you know. And I'm not a forgiving man."
He reached down and pulled the tape free. Jeremy licked his lips and stared up walleyed at Professor Creed and the woman behind him. She was damn pretty, he thought crazily. Delicate features, but those red eyes were damn spooky. She wore a skirt suit and pumps. She could've walked down the hall at the mutual fund company he worked at and no one would've given her a second look. How the hell had a psychopath like Creed landed her? And she was watching him with a small, pleased smile on her face. There would be no help from her.
"What do you want from me?" Jeremy asked hoarsely.
"We have some old business to settle, Jeremy," Professor Creed said calmly.
Jeremy Thornton closed his eyes. Shit. He thought of six years ago, when he had been a junior in college. "That again? Come on, Professor Creed, that's all water over the dam."
"Perhaps to you," Professor Creed affirmed. "But the fact is, Jeremy, you never should have been awarded your degree. You violated the terms of academic honesty."
"That…come on, Professor, I can help you now. I heard about you getting away. You'll need money."
"I've got money," the woman interjected, smiling coldly. "Therefore he does." Both men glanced at her. "Oh, I'm sorry," she said. "Please go on. I'm enjoying this."
"In my introductory philosophy class," Professor Creed said mildly, "you played around in class through the entire term. You cut class often."
"I was a college kid," Jeremy said.
"Oh, I could have forgiven you cutting class. Students do that all the time. Particularly the intro philosophy class; it's all non-majors who are taking the class to fulfill their requirements. No, Jeremy, I'm here today for the same reason I brought you before the Student Council six years ago. The final paper you submitted for my class was one that you purchased off the Internet."
"Student Council said I didn't do it," Jeremy quavered.
"Unfortunately for me, the police searched my home and discovered my hobby before the matter was adjourned. After that, my standing in the academic community took a rather abrupt fall. They dismissed the matter because of that, Jeremy. They never said you weren't guilty."
Professor Creed stood up and began pacing around the room. His voice was strident.
"Did you honestly think you'd get away with it? I'd seen that paper at least ten times before. My plan, Jeremy, was to file academic dishonesty charges against you and then take care of you myself. Circumstances intervened, and I was in a situation where I wasn't able to get to you." Behind his glasses, his eyes gleamed. Those tiny pupils fixed on the face of his former student. "But I am now," he commented. "And fate – well, my fiancée, actually – has brought me to Boston. Where you happened to be living. You had some immense good luck, Jeremy, but it seems that's run out."
Professor Creed turned around and looked out over the city. Jeremy Thornton had an apartment in a nice part of town, with a good view of the city. It wasn't that high up – seven floors or so – but it was enough. His apartment also had a balcony, on which Thornton had some tasteful patio furniture. Susana watched him, smiling to herself. He found himself rather enjoying this.
"The paper you bought," Professor Creed continued, "was a rather simplistic paper discussing the Tao Te Ching and specifically the concept of the uncarved block. It claimed that Lao-tzu stated that to make something useful was to betray its nature. A rather bizarre concept, and one I believe to be incorrect."
Professor Creed opened the glass door and strode out purposefully onto the balcony. There was something wonderful in being outside, and so high up. He breathed in the city air deeply and shot his cuffs. Had she brought it up? Yes, she had. Thoughtfully, she'd agreed to carry it in her purse for him, as it would be easier to conceal. It was right there on the padded patio chair. He turned and stared back into the room. Jeremy Thornton cringed from his gaze.
"Okay," Jeremy said. "Look, I had a lot of work. I was in a jam and I panicked. And it was wrong. I admit that. But listen, Professor Creed, you gotta listen to me. I can make it worth your while. How much do you want? Name it. I move money around every day. Easy. Whatever you want."
Professor Creed grabbed the rope binding Jeremy's ankles and began to drag him out onto the balcony. The expensive pants ripped against the concrete floor and Jeremy's shirt rucked up. Jeremy continued to beg his erstwhile professor for mercy. Professor Creed did not seem to be moved by the man's pleas.
"You know, that's one thing I never could tolerate about well-off students," Professor Creed said calmly. "Money won't get you out of everything, Jeremy. You never should have received your degree. My own hobbies do not change that fact."
"Come on," Jeremy said. "You're not gonna kill me. It's not right."
"Why not?" Professor Creed rejoined. "You not only buy a paper and present it as your own work, but you buy a puerile one. Jeremy, let me show you how a thing may be quite useful without being changed. Or carved, as Lao-tzu put it."
Susana Alvarez Lecter followed them outside, the heels of her pumps clattering on the concrete of the balcony. She was interested in watching this. Professor Creed had discovered his former student's name in the white pages in their suite. A quick phone call, claiming to be from the Alumni Association, had proven that this Jeremy was his former cheating student. It was a wonderful way to see him in action in a way she hadn't been able to before. Plus, she allowed, it would be so much fun to watch Lisa flip out once she realized what had happened.
Jeremy fishtailed on the balcony, thrashing like a caught fish. He thought they meant to throw him over the side. That was true, to an extent. However, Jeremy probably didn't have the imagination to realize what would happen next. Susana did. But this wasn't her job, it was Professor Creed's. She just wanted to watch.
And there was something admirable in watching him. His movements were crisp and decisive. Everything he needed to do he did with an easy, practiced skill that she found pleasing to watch. The six years of incarceration appeared to have done no harm to him at all. It was like watching a professional baseball player pick up a bat and take a few practice swings. He was doing what he had been born to do. She'd never had the opportunity to see her father at work, but she thought it would be something like this. So she stayed back and watched her man with no small degree of pleasure.
Professor Creed lifted the white rope from the chair and sat down easily in it.
"Jeremy," he said easily, "this rope disproves your purchased paper. It was already worked on, that is true. Someone took the time to make this rope. But when I have this rope, I can do things with it without needing to change it. This rope is, vis-à-vis me, the uncarved block. I have done nothing to change it. But I can use this rope, Jeremy, without changing its nature."
Jeremy Thornton looked like a trapped rat as he watched Professor Creed tie the traditional thirteen loops in the end of the rope.
"You're gonna…hang me…no…," he whispered.
"Hang you? Not as such, no. That wouldn't prove anything. It's a rope. You're supposed to use it to hang things. Or people, for that matter." Professor Creed finishing tying the noose and stood, walking over to his victim and slipping the rope over his neck. "No, Jeremy, I shall show you how to use this rope – unchanged by me – as a sharp blade."
"What…you can't do that," Jeremy gasped. Then it dawned on him what Professor Creed had said and he opened his mouth to scream. The tip of Professor Creed's Civilian pressed his throat. A drop of blood gathered and grew fat where the hooked tip dented the skin.
"Indeed I can, Jeremy, and I am. If you scream, though, you'll encounter this sharp blade first. You haven't much time left. Why spend the remaining time in pain when you don't need to?"
Jeremy Thornton trembled. He glanced over the side of his balcony, looked down, and shuddered. There was no negotiating with this psycho. There was merely a drop down to death. Down, the horrible direction, down through the night air to the street below he would never quite reach. But what was Creed talking about with a sharp blade? It was a fucking rope.
"Observe, Jeremy," Professor Creed said. "The uncarved block." Then he lifted the smaller man bodily. For a moment he cradled the smaller man in his arms. Jeremy Thornton was pale and sweating. Down, the terrible direction, the final and implacable destination. Professor Creed pivoted and threw him over the side. Up quickly and over the four-foot railing, and then he was screaming as he fell. Cold air enveloped him as the pavement rose up to greet him. Both Susana and Creed approached the railing to watch him fall.
Hanging is one of the oldest means of executions. This is largely for its simplicity and inexpensiveness. It can be a quite cruel means of execution; in a botched or purposefully harsh execution the victim will strangle to death over the course of fifteen minutes. British and American hangmen of the past sought to make the procedure more humane and quicker. In so doing, they instituted the long drop.
The idea behind the long drop was eminently humane, and it is worth pointing out that the hangmen who experimented to find the right drop were motivated by the urge to spare their charges unnecessary anguish. The knot would be placed under the right ear. The victim would drop a distance partially indicated by his or her height and weight. This drop would come to a sudden stop, and the knot placement would jerk the neck. Several bones in the neck would break in less than a second, causing the victim to suffer only a brief instant before becoming unconscious. As before, the victim would strangle to death at the end of the rope. However, now he or she would not be conscious for it.
The United States Army's experience with hangings had led them to the creation of a Hanging Drop Table. Someone weighing one hundred twenty pounds or less is dropped eight feet and one inch; someone weighing two hundred twenty pounds will be dropped five feet. For each five-pound increment in between there is another indicated length. It is a means of execution made science, death sliced into neat increments.
One might think that if a long drop provided a humane execution, that the longer the better would be the case. In fact, this is not quite so. In hanging as in anything else, there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Jeremy Thornton weighed one hundred and fifty-five pounds. Had he had the misfortune of being hanged by an executioner following the Hanging Drop Table, he would have been dropped six feet and six inches. There would have been a terrible jolt for him and then nothing.
But Professor Thomas Creed was Jeremy's hangman. And the professor did not concern himself overmuch with whether or not the fates he inflicted on his victims was humane. Thornton fell six feet, six inches, and kept on falling. The rope Professor Creed had tied around his neck was fifty feet in length. The end was firmly knotted to the railing on Thornton's balcony. The remainder was all available for the drop.
The rope tied around Jeremy Thornton's neck was no different than the rope it had been when Professor Creed bought it at a hardware store a few hours earlier. He had added no chemicals to it, twisted it no differently. No one would have ever believed that this simple hemp rope could become a sharp blade.
But when Jeremy Thornton's body came to a halt after almost a fifty-foot drop, a blade is exactly what it became. The rope held. Thornton's neck did not. The rope scythed through the trachea of the throat and the powerful neck muscles relentlessly. The mighty force of the stopped fall ripped Thornton's head from his body as easily as a man will rip a turkey leg from a Thankgiving turkey. The rope shuddered. The metal railing to which the rope was tied thrummed as the rope jerked.
Thornton's body was only stopped for the second it took the rope to cut through his neck. Then it began to tumble further. A great jet of blood arose from the ragged stump of his neck. Some of it painted the wall that had paralleled his fall. Some more pattered on the ground with a sound like rain. Thornton's body fell an additional twenty feet. For a moment the headless corpse stood upright when it hit the ground. Then it swayed and fell forwards, blood spraying the sidewalk with the last few beats of Jeremy Thornton's heart. His bound arms and legs trembled in a final seizure. Passersby stopped and stared at the horror that had suddenly interjected itself into the busy Boston sidewalk. A few women screamed. Above them, Susana Alvarez Lecter's eyes gleamed with pleasure at her man.
There are those who have believed that decapitation does not instantly kill. A common theory is that someone who has been decapitated may survive for perhaps ten seconds once the head has been cut from the body. Jeremy Thornton did not help in resolving this issue. His face contained the same look of horror and shock that it had possessed at the moment the rope ripped it free from his neck. The head itself was stuck in the noose for a moment or two until Professor Creed jiggled the rope a bit. Then it tumbled to the ground, landing with a sound like a ripe watermelon. It rolled into the street, where a Boston taxicab ran it over, not realizing until it was too late what it was. This made identification difficult, as Jeremy Thornton's head now sported a rather ugly tire print on the left side of its face.
A group of office women were emerging from the T station on the other side of the street at the time Jeremy Thornton died. They were celebrating the pending wedding of one of their number. They'd already visited a few bars and clubs, and so they were already a bit drunk and merry. In order to blackmail the soon-to-be-bride, so they said, they had brought along a video camera.
It turned out to be sheer dumb luck that the camera caught as much as it had. The receptionist holding the camera had already had a few drinks and raised the camera high as she raised her arms in inebriated glee. For this her compatriots yelled at her, stating she was wasting tape. But she captured just about everything on tape: Professor Creed throwing Jeremy off the balcony, the terrible drop, and the grisly aftermath.
The receptionist with the videocamera was fortunate enough to work for a law firm. In panic and not knowing what else to do, she called her employers once she realized what had happened. One of the partners, realizing what they had, assisted her in copyrighting the images before they were taken by the police. Major TV stations and the National Tattler all fought for bidding rights. It would not be until later, when the perpetrators of the crime were discovered, that the receptionist would regret selling so soon.
The lawyers were not unreasonable, however, and a copy of the tape was made available to the police for their investigation. All that they requested was that the police not display any images from the tape itself. This was granted. In a few days, a copy would be on Lisa Starling's desk.
Calmly, Susana and the professor left the apartment and strolled down to the lobby. They did not run as they left and did not attract any real notice as they entered the stairwell and proceeded down two flights of stairs, where they picked up the elevator for the rest of the ride down. They joined the crowd gathering to gawp at the headless corpse. After spending a few minutes cutting along the edges of the crowd, they had reached the other side of the mob. As sirens began to draw nearer, they crossed the street to the T station and got on board the subway. Above them, two police cars screeched to a halt along with an ambulance that was far too late to do anything for Jeremy Thornton other than zip him into a body bag. Two stops later, they got off to pick up their car, which took them back to their hotel.
Traffic was busy, but for a woman who had learned to drive fighting traffic in Buenos Aires, hardly worth noting. Dinner had already been sent up from room service. The concierge at the Park Plaza Hotel had been quite helpful in arranging the delivery so it would be there when they got back. Susana tipped him ten dollars for his trouble and thanked him very much. Once up in the suite, Susana satisfied herself with a quick call home to check in on her son and assure she missed him and would be home soon. Then they sat down to dinner in the suite's dining room.
It was lobster, and excellent by any standards. They ate by candlelight. Both Susana and Creed were pleased and exhilarated. It had been a good day.