Sean E. Britten

I’ve always been inspired by music (I know, super original!) and music has always been a part of my writing. Way back in the days of burnt CDs, my mates and I used to put together CD mixtapes and I came up with the idea of a series of short stories based around pieces of music. Mixtape is all short stories sharing their titles with different songs and inspired, to various degrees, by their lyrics, artists, and vibe.

Currently Playing: Cyndi Lauper – True Colors

Ever since I was a kid I could see them, with their black eyes and deformed faces. It took me a long time to realise others couldn’t see what I saw. It took even longer to understand exactly what I was seeing. Evil, the face of evil.

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Ever since I was a kid I could see them. On TV, in movies, or going about their day to day lives in public like everyone else. The ugly ones, with their lumpy pumpkin heads, rows of chiclet teeth, and those tiny, black, doll eyes. I tried asking my mom and dad why they looked different but I was told it was rude to stare, rude to point. And these people didn’t like being stared at either. After a while, as any child would, I assumed it was some kind of common deformity that was considered rude to talk about. Like asking about a person’s wheelchair, or wrinkles, or the colour of their skin. Certainly there were plenty of people who looked like them and seemed to live normal lives. Who I was told I could trust. A neighbour down the street, the pastor at our church, a policeman who I saw around town sometimes. A lot of the people on TV looked like them, I learned later they were called politicians.

I was in middle school before I worked out that what I was seeing wasn’t what everyone else saw. We were learning about World War Two and our teacher showed the class a photograph of the leaders of the United States, England, and Russia. FDR, Churchill, Stalin. I asked why it was that all three men shared the same facial deformity. Hitler, too, I’d seen enough photos of Hitler to know he was even more disfigured than the three of them. Why was it that almost all world leaders shared those same grotesque features that were relatively rare in daily life?

All I received back were blank stares. The teacher asked what exactly I thought their appearances had in common. As obvious as they were, I tried to explain about the swollen foreheads and distended features, the rows of small, cruel teeth, getting increasingly frustrated as they refused to understand me. The men’s eyes, those pitiless holes for eyes that bored out of a black and white photograph more than half a century old. Lucky for me maybe, I already had a reputation as something of a class clown. Eventually, my slightly hysterical explanations were dismissed as some kind of joke that wasn’t landing. I was told to sit down and shut up before I embarrassed myself any further.

Bit by bit, by asking careful and sometimes weird questions, I came to understand what others were seeing that I didn’t. Or what I was seeing that they didn’t. There was no facial deformity common among the world’s elite and scattered amongst the general population. Individuals who I’d thought shared this condition, including a teacher at our school and the mother of one of my friends, looked completely normal to the rest of the world. Even attractive in some cases. After a while, I learned to perceive a bit of what they saw if I forced it, kind of like a magic eye picture. The mundane faces buried within the pumpkin-headed monsters. It took longer for me to understand exactly what it was I was seeing, however.

Evil. I could see the face of evil. There were degrees sometimes in their appearances but generally not much. Evil was evil, their faces wore it and the features didn’t do much to distinguish small evils from large. The mother of my friend, I found out later that she would whip him with a cord across the backs of his legs where the welts wouldn’t show. None of us knew until the police took her away and he had to stay with another family for a while. I might have known sooner if I’d understood what I was seeing. The teacher at my school was found to be grooming students and tricking them into taking photos of themselves to send to him. It was a similar story with the pastor of our church. It was a big scandal at the time, a huge shock to his congregation, but by that point I’d begun to understand enough about the ugly ones that I wasn’t surprised. The neighbour beat his wife. The cop, I uncovered years later that he had a long list of allegations against him. Abuses of power, accusations of sexual coercion, excessive force, even allegations that he’d been behind the disappearance of a couple of homeless people. He’s still a cop as far as I’m aware, much higher up the chain of authority.

I wondered, why me? Was this a gift or a curse? Certainly, once I knew what I was seeing I could use it to steer clear of evil people in my life. They didn’t know I could see them, that gave me an advantage over those with ill intent. But God must have given me this ability for a greater purpose.

For years now I’ve hunted them. Thirty-two of them I’ve killed. I have rules to keep myself from getting caught. Although I move around constantly, I never hunt where I’m currently living. I always go searching for targets in nearby towns. Before moving in for the kill, I study my targets to make sure they’re worthy of my attention. I don’t kill every one of the ugly ones that I come across, that would be impossible. And evil is evil but some of them seem to earn their deformities through acts of moral compromises rather than by directly victimising people, like many of the politicians and CEOs and celebrities. Those I leave be. I only kill those who, in one way or another, are actively leaving victims behind them. I vary my methods so the police don’t think they’ve all been the prey of some kind of serial killer. Making it look like a home invasion gone wrong was a favourite tactic but I made sure to change up the weapons I used. A gun, a knife, a seemingly improvised bludgeon, or my gloved hands. I’d set fires, run one down with a stolen car while they jogged along a quiet road, and made several of them disappear entirely. A couple I’d made look like genuine accidents. And I never took trophies or returned to the scene of a crime. As long as I did my part correctly, I trusted God would protect me from the investigations afterwards.

In the motel room mirror, I studied my face the way I did every morning. The mirror was dull and spotted. The tiles surrounding it were cracked and discoloured along with the rest of the bathroom. Typical of the kind of cheap motel rooms that still took cash and asked no questions, where I usually stayed while hunting.

My reflection was that of an unremarkably handsome man in his early twenties, if I was any judge. Youthful, maybe, a few years younger than my actual age in appearance, but unremarkable. Every morning I studied my features hoping to see signs of virtue shining through them the same way evil was reflected in the faces of the ugly ones. Maybe if I killed enough of them my face would change. Or maybe I didn’t have the eyes for it. Maybe while I saw evil on people’s faces there were others who saw virtue and it was one of them who would eventually recognise me and prove the righteousness of my actions. My hair and eyes were brown. I was of average height but my arms and chest were corded with muscle. Forged into a weapon for the Lord.

I dressed in heavy clothes that helped to disguise my size before leaving. An unregistered handgun was stuffed into the back of my pants, a Saturday night special, but I only intended to use it as a backup if I could help it.

I’d found my latest target while trawling the streets at night. Ugly as sin, a fat pumpkin head balanced atop a scrawny body like some kind of scarecrow. It hadn’t taken long to realise he was a drug dealer, handing off little packets of meth at fast food restaurants and bus stations and all-night dives as I followed him from place to place. A dealer in poison and death, good enough. Over several nights, spread across several weeks, I’d watched his routine. He did his work at night, all night, and then returned home in the morning to sleep. He lived in a doublewide trailer with no immediate neighbours. When he got home, he’d be tired, spent, and he would sleep for hours. It was perfect. My plan was to make the killing look like a ripoff. Kill the ugly one, find any money or drugs he was holding to dispose of elsewhere, and burn the trailer to destroy the evidence.

I drove out to the edge of town slowly, obeying all traffic laws. A baseball bat was hidden under the passenger seat. There was an empty building, an abandoned factory that backed onto a strand of woods, where I parked. On the other side of the woods was the ugly one’s trailer. I hid the baseball bat under my hoodie and slipped between the trees. I wore gloves over my hands but I didn’t wear a mask. Unlike them, I didn’t hide my true face from the world.

I saw his beat-up car parked alongside the doublewide as I neared the other side of the woods. Circling the clearing, I made sure I wasn’t being watched before slipping the bat out from under my hoodie. When I was ready, I whispered a little prayer under my breath before crossing the clearing in several long strides. With momentum behind me, I rammed the thick end of the bat into the trailer door just above its handle. The lock shattered. The door swung open with a clatter.

A squalid smell poured out of the doublewide. My target didn’t own an animal, I’d checked, but you wouldn’t know it from the stench. A cat piss stink mixed with smoke, rotting food, and dirty clothes. I climbed into the trailer anyway. Takeout trash and empty beer cans littered the floor. I avoided treading on any of it as I moved into the kitchen.

“What the fuck?”

The ugly one entered the other side of the kitchen. He was only wearing underwear and his swollen head bobbled on top of his pale and skinny body, his mouth and black eyes almost buried in folds of flesh.

I didn’t waste time with explanations. Avoiding catching any countertops or cabinets, I swung the bat into his face. Cartilage crunched. From my perspective, blood began to run from the slitted holes in the middle of his face. If I concentrated, I could see the ghost of a more mundane young man about the same age as me with his nose mashed across his face, his features screwed up in pain. He reached for his nose, catching the blood as if he could put it back before any more spilled.

“Fuck, man! What do you want? Don’t hit me, what do you want?”

He staggered into his pantry, the accordion door collapsing. I hit him again, hard, above the ear. The blow dazed him and he fell in on himself. I hit him again and again until his mutant features collapsed. He sprawled forward on the kitchen floor. I heard his skull crack and give way as I brought my bat down like a hammer on the back of his head.

Thirty-three. I felt no different but I knew I’d done the right thing. I’d fulfilled my purpose, what God gave me this ability to do. I dropped the bloodslicked bat beside the body. Now, a quick hunt around the house to make it look like a robbery in case the fire I planned on setting didn’t completely annihilate the crime scene.

Moving through the kitchen and living space, I tore open cupboards and upended furniture. I didn’t actually care what I found. I wanted it to look like the work of a desperate and panicked junkie. The cops would fill in the narrative. I moved through the hallway to the bedroom.

A woman screamed. The sound staggered me and for several long seconds we both stared at one another. A skinny young woman in a bra and panties. Too young, she looked like a teenager. He was meant to be alone, he’d always been alone before. She tried to tuck herself into the corner of the bedroom. Hearing me kill the ugly one, her boyfriend, her client, her dealer, whatever he was to her, she’d been unable to find a good hiding place and settled for making herself as small a ball as possible. She was holding her phone but it looked like she hadn’t made a call yet. She’d been too scared to make any noise.

“Please, please, don’t hurt me,” she said.

Her face was cherubic. Whatever she was on, whatever the ugly one might have been giving her, it hadn’t started to eat at her looks yet. And more importantly, her features weren’t swollen and deformed by evil the way his had been. An innocent, but she’d seen my face now and she could bear witness against me.

“Please?”

An innocent, but for how long if this was where her choices had led her? Surely, before too much longer, I’d have been able to spot her on the street. Her head swollen, face distended, marred by evil acts. Surely my mission, staying free and able to fulfill my purpose, was more important than her life. She continued to beg as I reached for my gun.

I set a fire in the kitchen before I left. There was blood on me. I wore dark clothes so it wouldn’t show but I could see it marking my shoes and the cuffs of my sleeves. I ran through the woods to my car, finding it untouched. To get clean, I drove back to my motel room, showered, changed my clothes, and washed my shoes in the bathroom sink. I didn’t dare to look at myself in the mirror.

It was best I got out of town. I couldn’t be sure how quickly the fire would spread, or how soon that girl might be missed. Packing my things, I loaded them into the car and took my room key back to the reception office.

Standing outside the reception was a woman and child. As I approached, I saw how the child stared. Three or four years old, staring with the unabashed shamelessness of the very young. Eyes shining, mouth set in a thin, grim line, his expression unreadable. My heart started to pulse harder, climbing my throat. What do you see, child of God? I wanted to drop to my knees and shake him and ask him, what do you see?

The woman took her son by the shoulder. “Stop that, it’s rude to stare.”

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Sean: My little girl turned six months old earlier this week! What a strange and wonderful six months it has been. I’m sure you’re familiar with the phenomenon of time speeding up as you get older. When you’re a kid, a few months might feel like a lifetime but by the time you hit forty six months feels like nothing at all. It is astonishing to see how much she has actually changed in that time, from this wrinkly, apple-headed monkey I could hardly hold onto because there was just so little of her to get a hold on to this big, laughing, smiling, really engaged with the world infant. On the one hand, she changes so fast that sometimes it literally feels like she’s grown taller or had her face change overnight. On the other, those early days after she was just born feel like they were so long ago, it’s like she’s always been here.

And I know a lot of parents think their kid is advanced but I really mean it when I say she is growing fast. I’m fortunate enough that I’ve been working from home while my wife has been off over the last six months so I’ve spent a lot of time with both of them. But it was only recently I actually saw her in the context of other babies her own age and I’ve come to realise she is just a powerhouse. I knew she was physically advanced but it was a bit nuts to realise other babies around the six month mark are kind of still acting like potatoes while she’s been grabbing and scooting and rolling around to get where she wants for literally months now. More importantly she’s a super curious and happy kid too so she’s been so much fun getting to know, but I expect she’s going to keep growing into a handful.

Been getting some more short stories done. As I’ve said previously, I might toss out a couple of non-Mixtape stories soon but I haven’t gotten around to them and I’m not quite out of tunes just yet.

Oh, and if you’d like to help support indie publishing and short stories then here’s a Kickstarter to check out that I’m a part of! Well, I’m one of the authors in the anthology, I can’t honestly say I know much more than that but it seems like a really cool model and obviously if they’re including one of my stories they’ve got some good taste.

Thanks for reading!

Next Track: Garbage – Only Happy When It Rains