An Assassin's Story

  The world consists of two sides, one is the happy warm bright side and the other is sinister cold dark side. The dark side is full of ‘stuff’, stuff that upon looking would give you nightmare for years.
I’ve been a part of the dark side for a while, trust me I’m not proud when I say this but I’ve been an assassin for a good six-seven years before... Well that's the story I'm about to tell.
   New York in the 1960s, I was barely an adult. Things were changing fast and money was the only thing that kept us alive. Born in a poor house, with no father and a mother who worked two jobs to feed me and my sister. My friends had a gang and I joined in when I was 15.
   I’ve killed a lot of people. I’ve always regretted my past but I had to do everything to survive. Jobs were scarce back in the time and Mafias ruled the cities. Everyday was a struggle to feed yourself and being jobless meant suicide. So I decided to join the mafia as their assassin.
   I started around 1962, I was young, wild and free. The Marcuzzi Mafia hired me via a contractor who was my friend.
   This one time or rather the last time, I was assigned to kill a journalist who had all the evidences against the black businesses of the mafia. The boss who I had never met in my whole time as their assassin parceled a package which had a photo of the target, advance cash and cassette tape.
   The muffled voice on the tape gave me the details about my target and information about my mission. I noted every single useful information like his address, work and personal life so on in my bingo book. I used to keep a bingo book which had all the information about my targets as a symbol of respect for the people I have killed. I may have done extremely horrible things but I had my dignity and otherwise I am an honourable man. I have always hated killing people.
   Anyway, after that I destroyed the cassette tape and hid the money in the safe under my bed and set out to search for my targets place.
  His house was on a lonely street in Bronx. A lot of the homes resembled the Japanese nagaya patterns. There were quite some row houses on that street. I strolled around the area, approximately five blocks to get a good idea for my escape plan after finishing my work. For a few days I watched his house from a distance to get an idea about his schedule, I noticed that he would leave his house about 7 o’clock in the morning and returned by 5pm. Between 5pm to 9pm there was no movement in his house. Then few minutes later his lights would flicker, become unstable for few seconds and then it would quiet down. Soon after that he would eat his dinner straight out of the fridge and go to sleep. This continued for few days.
   One morning I decided to break in and take a look around his house to find a hiding spot to ambush him. As usual he left at sharp 7 but I waited till it was past noon when everyone was busy napping. I broke in without a sweat as there weren’t any heavy duty locks. I went in and shut
the door behind me. Upon looking around, his house reminded me of traditional Japanese houses with wooden floor boards and sliding doors that they showed in the movies. Right in-front of the entrance there was a long hallway and at the end of the hallway there was a kitchen door.
There were two rooms side to side on the right side of the entrance door and single room next to the bath on the left side of the entrance. Even though the house was lit, there was a dark gloomy vibe to it. The air in the house was damp and stinky and it was freaking cold inside even though it was quite sunny outside.
   I started out by checking the single room next to the toilet then the other two rooms and then the bathroom, weird thing was that all rooms were empty not a single piece of furniture was kept, anything for storage was as a part of the house just like in old Japanese houses. Besides a few empty attached closets with two compartments there were some pictures of a lady and a little girl which I assumed to be his wife and his daughter.       In that same room there was a opening in the floor which led to an underground bunker, old Japanese houses had these bunkers in case of earthquakes and floods. Without much thinking I went in the bunker to check it out. The bunker was pretty spacious. There were two rooms, one in which I was currently standing and another which was adjacent to this. The other room was at the end and divided by a metal door.
  There was a study table and chair along with newspaper cut outs of various incidents of murder and kidnappings done by the Mafia. A few scribbled notes sat on the table. I thought it was where he sat and wrote most of his articles for the newspapers and magazines.
  Then I moved on to the metal door and opened it. The view I saw inside still sends shivers down my spine. A block of stone was kept right in the middle of the small room. On the other three walls, racks of vials filled with coloured potions, animal skins and other artifacts I'd never seen were arranged similar to a museum. The floor had a transmutation circle, leftovers of squeezed lemons, blood splatters and what not. There was what looked like a dog skull and a foul smell filled the entire bunker. What stood out most was a picture of a man pinned to the wall next to the door, it was crossed out with blood. I guessed the
journalist was trying to curse that man with black magic, I didn’t believe in all of that but the scene before me had bewildered me, never had I thought I would come across such a place. It was afternoon and I decided to stop hunting around the house and wait for him upstairs. While climbing up, a video recorder caught my eye. Labelled tapes were arranged next to it. I started looking through the camera’s old files. All files were titled as Test Number 1 and so on. I watched few of his videos, all the videos I watched were bizarre.
   In every video this man tortured himself standing in the center of the transmutation circle without so much as a single sound of pain. He would strip naked and cut himself with a knife or hit his back with a whip. 

In every video he kept repeating the same sentences:
To create one must first destroy.
The ultimate sacrifice given by someone is the sacrifice of flesh.

I thought to myself that that man had an immense endurance to pain. One video I found was named differently as 'sacrifice’, I regretted watching that video, it still haunts me and its not so easy to shake me. The video started with that man standing bare clothed from top to bottom and chanting words for over a minute. He then brought a dog into the circle and as soon as the chanting stopped he stabbed the dog right through his heart and kept stabbing it while he smiled deviously. What he did next shook me completely, he carved out the heart of the dog and laughed maniacally. Then he tore a bite from the dog's flesh and consumed it like a madman. Then he turned towards the camera and grinned as if he knew that I was watching the video. I felt the hair on my body stand and sweat trickled down my forehead. Soon I shut the camera and hastily left the bunker. 

After reaching the main door I took a deep breath and calmed myself. I convinced myself that this man was just a maniac and I had to finish my job quickly and get out of there.
   The scenes kept flashing in my mind over and over again. When I came to my senses and found myself in front of the refrigerator somehow. I was in the kitchen and the smell there was so bad that I wanted to throw up. Instinctively I opened the fridge and my jaw dropped in utter shock. There were jars of dead rats, frogs and lizards. I gagged pretty hard and ran out of the house to breathe in some fresh air. The rest of the afternoon I spent in a small garden near his house, I tried forgetting but the images were glued to my mind.
   When I looked at my watch, it was about time he was going to return. So I went back because I didn’t want to come back here to do my job. I had received a huge amount of money for this target and failing to kill him meant getting killed by the mafia. My life was on the line in any circumstance so I decided to take my chances with the journalist.
   I went back in and hid in one of the empty closets in the room where the bunker was. It was 5pm and I heard the door open the man didn’t seem to notice my presence. I kept my patience, for a few moments, I had forgotten all about the bunker and the kitchen. As soon as the man tried to open the underground hatch I quickly pounced on him from the back, tackled him to the floor and stabbed his heart several times. I killed him before he could see me. Although I knew he died the moment I stabbed him, I waited for him to bleed out just to be sure. Once his body turned cold and pale, I checked his pulse. There was no sign of a rhythmic beating from his heart. I let out a sigh of relief and a breeze of satisfaction spread throughout my body. I quickly erased any evidence of me being there and left the strange house.

   On my way home, I bumped into a drunk man in the crowd I helped him up, I just a had a quick glance, to my terror it was the same person I had killed minutes ago. I blinked again and saw it wasn't him, I was hallucinating. The man walked away and I went home hurriedly.
   For months i couldn’t sleep, even when my eyes drooped, the face of that man stared back at me. One morning I was reading a newspaper when his face and his name Suzuya Sato appeared before my eyes, I was about to scream when I realized it was my mind playing tricks on me.
   I packed up my things and left the town without even taking the remaining payment. I always felt eyes on me wherever I went. To free myself from this nightmare I did some digging in that man’s past. I found out that his family was murdered by the mafia because he was trying to expose them. He had a wife and a five-year old daughter and they were killed in cold blood, all he wanted was revenge.
   Later I saw a news telecast that one of the mafia head Keyser Marcuzziwas found dead. His guts were turned inside out through his mouth. They showed another man’s face on tv who was the hand of the boss, it was the same photo that I saw the bunker crossed with blood. They were the people who hired me to carry out assassinations.
   Without thinking much, I left home and surrendered myself to the police. Told them everything in the hopes that this nightmare stops someday. I have been charged with  life imprisonment and a death sentence.
It's been a few years now,  Suzuya Sato still appears gives me nightmares. I thought revealing the truth would release me from this hell, but it doesn't.

Written by:
Ashish Kamat.