[100 Challenge] Ocean_51

It started when I was in my late 30s. Faces passing loading onto a plane. Each face: I could feel the pain, the specific pain that face had been carrying. But more than that I began to be able to sense the story. The narrative. A miscarriage, a guilty habit, an infidelity to one's values. The event that led to the face. Streets and streets of people in tears…

The townsfolk thought the duke a saintly lord who conducted good business from afar. But his thin fingers were icepicks each he felt a red lust build inside him he could not restrain. From his chalet on the hill he could observe the schoolchildren, the millworkers, and traffic at the bakery. Often he would come down, walk among them, brush coats and smell their collective stench. On these outings he’d pick a victim, maybe a lass fresh from church with locks bouncing, or a jaded old man like the cobbler from last month, or a blue-eyed toddler or its mother. He despised each alike, it was only a whim whose features he caught upon. He would watch for a week or so, then catch them in an alley, public bathroom, theatre or kitchen. There he threw his restrained persona down and with a viciousness like a bloodlusting vampire attack them and tear the throbbing muscle from their chest. This would instantly subdue him, and he’d calmly survey what he’d done, clean up, and return to his house on the hill. All the townsfolk thought the duke a saintly lord.