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go missing in the city, especially if you live alone. The papers will talk about how her neighbor’s terrier wouldn’t stop barking when the neighbor returned from her weekend away, and how the police broke down the third girl’s door. They’ll make much of the thin nylon ropes that tied her, how the sheets were soaked in blood. The third girl was found braless, her jeans still on. Half clothed, she is completely vulnerable. So much better to display your work, your art, your lines of release.
    But they’ll do no justice to the multitude of curls and swirls that spiral down her arms, the web of fine lace etched in her shoulder, the three delicate waves that tickle her navel. Instead they’ll focus on the mark in the center of her chest, what appears to be the eye of a snake within the outline of a leaf. And of course, the long deliberate slash across her throat. These papers don’t appreciate the finer subtleties of your work, your infinite skill. Instead they butcher your beauty with:
    WEIRD SEX CARVINGS!
    TEACHER’S THROAT SLIT
    GRISLY MURDER SHOCKER!
    Some details will purposefully be left out, at the police’s request.
    It’s early days still.
    No one takes these papers seriously, although they are the first to link your victims together. They will connect the first two murders you committed to her, the THIRD MURDERED GIRL FOUND WITHIN WEEKS . They render the women as flat and lifeless as the thin sheets they’re printed on. Once labeled “tragic victims,” these women are forever pressed down into the past. And after all it couldn’t possibly happen to us or anyone we know—those deaths would be too good for this tabloid trash.
    But these are the papers that will christen you. At first they will call you “Reaper Man,” “The Creeper,” or, even more crudely, “The Carver.” Eventually they will learn what tool you use to dispatch the girls, and one paper, inspired by the cuts, inspired by your blade, will call you by a name that all will know you by, in time. It’s not, of course, your true name, but it’s one that pleases you. It’s an old name. It’s a good name.
    In time the third girl will be reduced to one picture, to make room for other dead girls’ pictures. As the summer progresses she will shrink until she is merely a thumbnail included in the growing column of dead girls.
    There have been others before her and there will be others after her, but she is the one who establishes you and your place in this world. People will remember her as the third girl who made it official, who placed third in the race where the winners are losers.
    SERIAL KILLER AT LARGE!
    It feels right to go back to the place she loved, the place you first met, the place where she spent one of her last hours on earth. The checkout line that you exit from today is the same one that the dead girl exited from, in all senses of the word. The cashier won’t remember her, though, not even when she seesher picture in the paper a week later. The third girl was the two hundred and forty-ninth customer she rang up that day. All the cashier wanted to do was to—
    â€”get off my shift and find out what that son of a bitch who calls himself a man is doing and if he is fucking that bitch like I know he is then—
    You smile at the cashier, and despite her hot fevered thoughts, she smiles back at you. Everyone does. They can’t help it. You have such an infectious smile. Infectious, catching, irresistible.
    You have a reason to smile. This has proved to be a great place for getting what you want. You with a single goal, closer, closer ever still.
    There’s nothing like a little shopping to get the party started.

    Â 
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    The Maiden of Morwyn Castle , Transcribed by John Lamb | PART ONE
    NE NEVER KNEW WHERE THE MAIDEN first came from; some said from the neighboring village and others said by way of another town, but most said she