Love Me to Death by Susan Gee

His favourite spot was the living room chair. If anyone left their house he could watch through the net curtains. He’d been displeased when the mother had left. She had been at home all day. When he was off work he’d hear her singing as she moved through the house. She was slightly overweight and plain, just as a mother should be, but she smiled a lot too, which was odd. He’d heard her laugh through the wall more times than he’d ever heard his own mother’s laughter. Mr Anderson couldn’t even remember what his mother’s laugh sounded like. They were the closest to family that he’d got. She’d gone now, the previous mother, and when a new woman had replaced her, he realised how easy it was to start again with a new family.

Mr Anderson smiled. There had been some mistakes, but he’d improve. He’d started his project and things were good. He made a sound deep within his throat, in between a cough and a gasp. He’d waited so long. It was all he’d ever wanted and he was surprised at how much it meant to him now that it was here – a family of his own just like the people next door. It was about to become reality. He had everything to offer: his own house, a quiet space, time to make things perfect. He was ready.

Despite the darkness, he could still make out the shape of the box in the corner of the room where he kept his modeling tools. He had stenciled the words ‘Vive Hodié’ on the top: words from one of the sundials at The Cage, his favourite place.

These were the tools to create his family. He thought about the first doll he’d completed. He’d made the figure with painstaking details, a man in blue denim jeans with a checked shirt. He remembered the look on the man’s face when he’d been working on him: the horror that turned to compliance as the knife finished its work. The way his eyes bulged as the last breath left his body – the bloody clump of hair that he’d carefully removed from the scalp and taken away in a plastic bag before he left him there on the concrete.

The snow had covered the street by now and he could see the glint through the window, so bright despite the darkness. He started to rock in the chair, like he did when he was young; it was still comforting today. The steady movement was calming, but it was more than that – it was like being rocked to sleep.

The body of the homeless man had been found quickly. Mr Anderson hadn’t tried to move it. He wondered if anyone had found the doll he’d left at Lyme Park, or if the police would ever connect the two. In the darkness he started to laugh. He couldn’t help it. The sound was too loud in the quietness of the house and for a moment he imagined his mother standing in the doorway, legs wide and face stern with anger, asking him, ‘How dare you make a noise?’ When it didn’t happen he laughed again, louder. It was an odd sound – a sound that this house wasn’t used to. Such happenings were confined to next door, but that was about to change. He would allow it to happen. Mr Anderson would let happiness in, and it would taste as crisp on his tongue as the icy flakes of snow that had started to fall outside.