CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

This was it, Cassius thought. The sweet spot. That liminal place between inspiration and immediacy where black ichor poured onto the page and the story told itself.

The Heartless Phantom.

They whisper her tale in the shadowy corners of Yamhill. A woman scorned, betrayed by her lover, left to die with a gaping hole where her heart should be. But death was not the end for her – merely a gruesome new beginning.

Now she stalks the streets on moonless nights. A figure in tattered black, face hidden behind a veil of tears, forever searching for what was stolen from her.

But beware, for she doesn't seek her own heart. No, the Heartless Phantom hunts for others - specifically, the brokenhearted. Those suffering from betrayal, abandonment, unrequited love. She can smell their pain from miles away, drawn to their anguish like a shark to blood.

They say if you're nursing a broken heart and hear sobbing in the night, run. Run and don't look back. For if she catches you, she'll tear into your chest with spectral claws, ripping out your still-beating heart to fill the void in her own chest.

But it's never enough. The stolen heart withers and dies within moments, leaving her empty once more. And so she wanders, eternally hunting, forever heartless.

So guard your heart well, dear reader. For in Yamhill, a broken heart might just be the death of you.

Cassius paused. The bones were there. The grist for his monster's mill. He'd add flesh later, the little details to sell the lie, to lend her ghost that veneer of ersatz authenticity this town so readily consumed.

Everything about this story felt right, organic. As if Amanda's demise was always meant to be immortalized. Fate had brought her to him, and he'd returned the favor tenfold.

Cassius's gaze drifted to the stack of older newspapers teetering on the corner of his desk. They stretched back a few days. The headlines read:

Man Found Dead In Local Haunt.

HORROR: Young Woman Murdered In Scare Attraction.

And this evening's sensationalist effort: Man Hanged – Oregon Serial Killer Claims Third.

Serial killer. Such a strange label, and one he'd never expected to be bestowed upon him. It was fitting, though, that the media had learned the intricate details of these murders and still completely missed the point.

But still, they were bold proclamations, each one bolder than the last. They marked his passage, these milestones of newsprint and rumor. Charted his metamorphosis from mere muse to maestro.

Amazing, really, how a man could live near six decades and never truly flex his wings. He'd spent years as a dilettante, nibbling the world's rind, sipping its dregs in pursuit of some amorphous more. But in all that time, he'd never savored the marrow, never gulped the raw stuff of life and death and the knife's edge between.

Not until now.

These killings, as he termed them – because ‘murders' felt so ugly – were simply vehicles for his mission. But like any pursued passion, the more you nurtured it, the more it gave in return.

And what it gave to Cassius was a high no chemical could compound.

He'd spent endless midnights pondering the great gothic tales of old. Wondering at the alchemy that could transmute ink and parchment into real human emotion. The secret, he'd learned, was in the suspension. That gasp between knowing and believing; the half-second where the trap door of doubt swung wide and the ground dropped away.

It's where terror lived. Strung out on that spider silk between illusion, delusion and reality.

Cassius had come to realize that he walked this razor wire like a master. With each life he cut short, he breathed a dose of reality into the lungs of a town dizzy on myth and superstition.

What a run it had been, but every story needed an ending. Cassius had written the ending to this story before he'd even penned the first chapter, because the culmination was the most important part. His magnum opus was yet to come, and he had a climax ready to shake the angels from their clouds.

Tonight, he would apply the finishing touches to his work, so that tomorrow he could present it to the world. He needed to clip headlines and photographs from newspapers and stick them next to his writings, to give the reader that immersive experience and prove that all of these tales had really happened.

So Cassius picked up his pen, found a blank sheet of paper, and wrote the words he'd been waiting to write for years.

To be published upon my death…