Horror - Short

This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are fictitious and any similarities to actual persons, locations, or events is coincidental. This work cannot be used to train artificial intelligence programs.  No AI tools were used in the writing of this story.

All rights reserved. Reactive Murder Copyright © Eddie Generous 2026

REACTIVE MURDER

The following is the complete and unedited autobiographical account as we received it.

—

There was a first time, of course. There’s a first time for everything, right?

I was at the movies alongside the dozen or so other patrons who’d braved the sideswiping sleet and future bouts with colds to get to the dingy old theater on Avonlea Boulevard. One of the original multiplexes. Back then, they weren’t so common. What happened was all wrong in a way that drove nails into my genetics, and I’ve wondered since if any of the others heard what I heard. Was I the only one?

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

On the screen, a promo for an action flick ran its expected course. A masked superhero spoke in harsh tones to a young woman, not quite a damsel in distress, not quite a love interest. You know how it goes. It was one of the bad Batman movies; I’m 99% sure of that. The superhero’s voice was his own for only a few seconds before the background sounds drained and the tenor on his lips thinned and heightened. Going higher than the Bruce Wayne norm.

“When he comes, he comes in the flesh of another.”

Quickly and abruptly, the sound flooded back. It was a queer thing to have in the middle of a preview, so I looked around to gauge the impression imprinted on the other patrons. Those faces told me a fact that didn’t come at first, but when it did, it froze my soul at the core.

Only I’d heard that voice.

I sank into my seat and stared up at the previews that melted quickly into the feature. Those words reigned over the plateau of my waking mind and I haven’t even the faintest memory of the film itself. I’d thought I was losing it.

“You imagined it,” I whispered as they others exited around me.

And what if I hadn’t imagined it?

The words and their singularity jarred me so strongly that it’s difficult to put into an explanation. I was in college back then, third and final year of my first go-round. I took television production and was doomed to graduate without a clue as to what I wanted from life or a plan of action once I figured that out. That’s the thing, isn’t it? Society trains to want for things, more and more things, before we even know what those things are or why we should want them. Food, shelter, medicine, companionship, sure, those things present themselves clear and obvious. Got to eat. Got to sleep. Got to fix up a broken leg. The rest is excess. I see that now thanks to TIME, the great professor, and PAIN, the fantastic tool of memorization. Back then, I was just like every other twenty-year-old with a blooming five-figure student debt and a pair of special edition Air Jordans on my feet—three more pairs in my closet.

I was that young man until that message entered my ear and conquered my very being. When he comes, he comes in the flesh of another.

I rode the bus letting the shaking in my veins slow and my head wrap around what was surely a hallucination. The further I drew from the theater, the more the strength of what I’d heard settled in as something not only potentially harmful, but real. It was a warning, so obviously ominous that I tried to understand it rather than wish it away. This was likely one of about five wise things I had done since beginning college. Although admitting its existence helped me very little.

From my seat in the back third of the bus, I cast sideways glances, and it was the first time that I’d recognized the error of my choices. Too late. It was a good time of night to splurge on a taxi ride. Freaks come out at night, Whoudini said that, and he was right. On a handicap bench, one that ran lengthways to permit ease, two baldheaded dudes in plaid button-ups and baggy jeans stared at my Air Jordans. I began to cower into myself, holding my gaze to the far side of the bus, being the opposite of threatening. Conveying: I don’t want no trouble.

One of the two had a neck tattoo, and back in 1995, hardly anybody had neck tattoos—rappers and bikers. The tattoo was a snake, I think. The bus slowed and the two gang-fitted men stood and grabbed bars on either side of my seat. My heart pounded and my mouth dried. Looking forward. I held one hand on the bar above the seat, a grasp so tight that the blood drained and my fingers ached. One of the two leaned down to me and I sensed his presence before I heard his voice, before I felt his hot breath on my ear. If I had been standing, I would’ve fallen into a frightened puddle.

“Your shoe’s untied, kid.”

The bus stopped and the maybe-not-actually-thugs departed. Three blocks later, I managed to look at my shoes. There it was, a once bright white lace was dipped in the sludgy, black, bus floor filth. A breath pin-pricked out of my mouth in deflated balloon style.

It had been a hard night for me and rather than go back to my room in the house I shared with seven other guys, I went to my girlfriend’s place. It was my first serious relationship. She’d given me keys and we had plans for the end of the school year when the lease on the shared house ended. She was a local, wasn’t certain what she wanted to do, and until she figured it out, the plan was to wait tables. Pretty much, we were on the same canoe to nowhere, paddles dry.

Of course, she never got the chance to figure life out. This is my fault. My burden. She lived in a nineteen-floor apartment building. The elevator buttons went all the way to twenty, skipping unlucky thirteen. The lobby light glowed as was normal and the place was dead quiet. It was after midnight and all of this added together to create a warm sense of normality.

Stainless steel panels broke up the white plaster walls; I called the elevator and waited. Kat lived on the twelfth floor. Likely, she’d be asleep. I needed the closeness, her warmth, asleep or not. The sanity of our mutual affection would be my balm. You get it, I’m sure.

The elevator stopped on Kat’s floor and the doors opened with an electronic ping. Before me was a little old man. His back hunched as he leaned on two black canes. His jerky forward motion nearly pinned me to the wall. “Oh, geez! Where’d you come from?” he said and then laughed, as if just noticing me, and having my presence startle him.

“This is my floor,” I said and stepped around the tiny man that seemed to take up the entire elevator.

“See ya ‘round, buckaroo,” the man said as the doors closed and then the car started down, signaling with that electronic ping.

I thought nothing of it. Nothing. He was the only person I’d seen since stepping into the building, and the description I gave of him later did no good for my case. Blaming a decrepit old man for a crime of such magnitude is like blaming a nun for raiding the collection plate.

As expected, the apartment was quiet and dark. I stripped as I walked. Kat’s bed, her warm cocooned body, her Olay shampoo, these were the beacons calling to me. I needed that strong familiarity. So, I crept into the room, climbed into the queen bed, and wrapped my hand around the bodily lump I saw in the dim streetlamp glow from below the window. Wetness and warmth. I thought of piss and then vomit and then…my hand jerked back. Panicked, I returned my hand to around Kat’s middle where I’d touched the warm moisture. My fingers found an opening, a rigid gap of flesh. Still not understanding the curious situation, I fingered into the space. It did not feel like skin. Whatever slim clutch held Kat’s stomach together disappeared under my fingertips and her guts spilled onto the bed and floor. I screamed and leapt to my feet.

It took time to muster the courage and to calm my shock before I called the police.

They arrested me on the spot.

I explained the old man and the accounts of where I’d been and when—of course I left out the voice I’d heard at the theater, I’m not crazy. I had the ticket stub and I had my transfer slip from the bus.

I spent three nights in the county jail with men much harder looking than the frightening men from the bus. Wrought, demented with stress, I lashed out on my first night behind bars. A man about my age, attempted to force a trade of my Air Jordans for his dirty department store boots. I freaked and took a beating. The shoes became a noticed element. Suddenly my bus pass and my memorable shoes linked me away from the crime long enough to put sufficient doubt into the case for the district attorney’s office. People travelling late nights notice a kid in pricey white sneakers.

Thankfully.

Which gave me hardly any time at all to do the crime, dispose of the weapon in a place beyond nearby reach, and then return to discover the body. I’d have to be a master and I was just a floater with a bruised face and socked feet.

I went free. I finished school. I was friendless and hopeless by graduation. I moved as far away from Seattle as I could. Taking off is so easy in the movies, but everything costs and I was up to my neck in school debt. No backpacking across Europe or South America for me.

It hurt my mother to see me go so far, but I had to get away. I worked quietly at the Sears in the Walden Galleria Mall, in Buffalo, NY. Eleven years passed and my life was still headed nowhere. I had an education in a field I didn’t want to pursue, not exactly. I lived in a bachelor apartment with nothing but a television, a couch, a PC, and enough dishes that it was possible to go three days without washing. Most troubling, I hadn’t experienced the loving embrace of a woman since Kat.

These were horribly lonely years for me.

Then one day something clicked. I decided to shed the scales of torment and live life. The voice, the murder, that night collectively, it was a freak thing—sure, random violence in America happens, right?

What happened in Kat’s apartment wasn’t really going anywhere, but it wasn’t the first thing I thought about when I woke up. Not anymore. There was progress and hope. I took classes that accented my college diploma in TV production and pared it with my quiet hobby. I saw a future in computers and television. Many instructors had pointed this out to me. I was no great pioneer, just lucky. What they said made sense and I saw room to move forward.

After three years of part-time studies, I graduated a two-year course in program design. I continued to work at Sears as the labors of love rarely paid the bills, at least until enough others learned to love them as well.

I was thirty-seven when I sold my little software company for enough money that I laughed, then cried, then laughed some more when I saw the figure in my bank account. The wasted time and the freak reason behind my existence was firmly burned into the past. Life was ahead, not behind. All those zeroes would make Karl Marx blush. My brain pivoted and spun, what I had was never enough. There were restaurants, cars, homes, things I never knew I needed that I suddenly had to have. Shiny amazing things so much bigger and better than sneakers. Loneliness became a foggy memory and after two-dozen looking-to-be-seen young beauties blew into the dust, I met Marianna. My first wife.

Le Cirque had become a favorite of mine just as soon as footing the bill was within my means. The staff knew me to see me. I won’t pretend they cared for my presence the way they would for an actor or musician. Nothing like that. They smiled, nodded, pretended to recall my name, and some probably even did—right after they read it from the reservation register.

“Mr. Morris, your table is nearly ready,” said the pretty man in a tuxedo standing guard at the entrance, leaning in as he spoke. “We had a surprise in numbers. Some people call for a table and sometimes they forget their damned entourage.”

He was affable and I understood that in a world with wildly wealthy people, the moderately wealthy must wait, sometimes. Strangely, that day and possibly for the first time, the waiting burned me.

“Why the hell did you let them all in?”

Marianna clutched my arm. One of those don’t make a scene kind of clutches. We’d eloped three hours earlier in the small bungalow belonging to Marianna’s parents out in Yonkers. Marianna’s mother was agoraphobic and hadn’t left the home in better than a decade, and Marianna’s father was permanently bedridden.

The shrunken man officiating the ceremony was agreeable, quick, and yet pedantic about his duty. We stayed long enough that Marianna’s parents did not embarrass her. Their depleted health and homebound quirkiness had a way, to say the least.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Morris,” the young man continued. “If it were up to me, I’d stand firm on the reservation. You know, when he comes, he comes in the flesh of another. He comes when you want him least. I can only do my best to keep everyone happy.”

“What did you just say?”

The young man seemed lost.

“I just—” There was a beep on the podium before the young man and he straightened his spine. “Your table is ready; this way, please.”

Sweat rolled down my neck and onto the collar of my Hugo Boss jacket. Marianna took my hand. She was so beautiful that I cringed at the thought of Kat and that old message returning; relayed and lengthened this time. Like I hadn’t yet understood all it could do.

“Why did he say that?” I said, nearly moaning.

Our waitress had obviously been around the wealthy enough to know that any behavior is reasonable so long as there were the finances to back it up. So, she simply cleared her throat.

I blurted out, “Oh, I don’t know, champagne, Dom Pérignon.”

Once she left, Marianna leaned into my shoulder, worried. “Say what?” she asked.

“That man, that dainty shit at the door, he said, ‘when he comes, he comes in the flesh of another.’ He said something else too, why did he say that?”

“Darling?”

“You heard him say those words, too, didn’t you? Tell me you heard.”

“Maybe you’re tired?”

“You had to have heard him!”

She didn’t, of course. I understand it now, when devils involve themselves in our lives, they open the slim doors and if you’re at the wrong angle, you get lucky and miss the sights. These warnings are otherworldly and meant for the targets of mayhem. They don’t come in a way conducive to group problem-solving, if you catch my drift.

Her beautiful face before linking up with Kat’s face, her spilled guts… I loved Marianna so much I thought my heart would burst, and I knew what was coming, but I didn’t know how to stop it. I had to get her away, away from everything. The champagne probably came to the table only seconds after we left—the service at Le Cirque was usually quite prompt.

I hailed a cab and asked the driver to take Marianna and me to my apartment. I had no plans of entering my home. I needed the car from the parking garage. I kept expecting the driver to turn around and speak words and a voice not his own, but it didn’t happen.

“You’re being so strange!”

“Trust me,” I said. Going into what happened to Kat would be simply too much. Told wrong, it made me look crazy and like a killer.

We rushed down into the dim, oil-scented parking lot below the building. I clicked the fob to unlock my Range Rover HSE. Inside the plush cube, utter safety washed over me. So damned impossibly safe, I sighed and deflated, my body felt congealed to the leather.

A short psychotic break. No more, I scolded myself and still, I knew better.

“Let’s take our honeymoon, somewhere special. What do you say? A remote cabin in the mountains?”

Marianna smiled at me and said, “Wherever you like. But stop all this,” she did air circles with her hands, “craziness.”

“It’s done, baby. We’ll head out of town. You ever see a glacier?”

She shook her head, and I started the Rover. That moment, the memory of a one-way trip across the country flashed. Seattle to Buffalo, on the bus with everything I owned stowed in the undercarriage. There had been signs for Glacier National Park, Montana along the way. It was about time I finally followed those signs.

I still haven’t seen those particular glaciers, even today.

Eventually, we got onto the I-80 and drove for thirty minutes. And then it began, Marianna pressed the power button on the stereo. She lowered her window, clicked open her seatbelt, and smiled at me. I watched her do this, never suspecting. I see it so damned clearly now, in my mind, on replay.

“Been a blast, buckaroo,” she said, her subtle Puerto Rican accent gone.

Roadwork ahead; men with shovels and men steering big yellow machines. They witnessed the nastiness and vouched for me once the police got to them. The heel of Marianna’s shoe punctured the leather of the seat when she hopped up and popped out the window like an escaped jack in the box. Flying away from life, directly into a caution sign that nearly decapitated her.

I suppose had I been driving more than forty, her head would’ve come away cleanly, but being as it was a construction zone, I’d slowed. All-in-all, things were different this time. The police brought up Kat, but my expensive lawyer silenced the question before I had to answer. I never spent a night in lock-up and only the National Enquirer alluded to my being a serial killer of lovers.

Strained, I ran again.

This time I found myself back in Washington. I bought a house only three blocks from my mother’s place in Walla Walla. Every evening, I went to my childhood home for supper. I paid her bills and she liked having me around. By 2015, I had begun to feel all right about life again. I told my mother about the warnings and the murderous thing that found a way to destroy my happiness, the buckaroo thing. She sent me to see an elderly woman, a friend of my long dead grandmother. This woman was Chinese and looked about a thousand years old. She sold herbs, read palms, and told me I was damned.

I explained this to my mother and she came up with the second suggestion: church. God versus a devil, it fit, and I saw hope, again. I donated money to the kitty and helped with social and sports events. I still worked part-time on small things and my modest lifestyle no longer depleted my once handsome nest egg.

Things went okay for a good long while. God wasn’t the answer to my predicament, but by the time I knew this, I’d fallen in love with a dutiful Christian named Natasha Kraus.

Natasha had a son and I, suddenly, as if swatted together via magic wand, had a full family. Caleb Kraus, Natasha’s son, was eighteen and fully dependent on his mother. Physically and mentally handicapped, the boy was a pillar of our short relationship. He used an iPad to communicate needs by pressing one of six pictures on the screen.

He was a lot of work.

He and his mother were worth it. I’d never seen a woman so strong and certain of her place in the world. Her beauty was inner. Her beauty was her being.

We married on a Sunday in May. The birds were out and chirping us good luck. The congregation smiled and applauded. The choir sang song after song in praise of God, in praise of holy matrimony. The way the light hit the stained glass sent glorious rays of assurance through me. It was a wonderful day and once again, I experienced the blessings of the heart, the blessings of a survivor of horrors only to find light. And yet, I waited with anxiety. Nobody popped up with the sinister words and we lived for months without a hitch. I’d purchased us a new home prior to the wedding, in secret, and had it fitted with every imaginable tool to make the hard life Caleb lived easier on all of us. Natasha loved it.

I became king of her smiles.

Then it came, the night before my birthday.

Seth Meyers was on the television interviewing Jason Schwartzman. The actor and the host traded the necessary thank yous for invitation and attendance. Schwartzman began explaining a movie he directed at the age of ten and then his voice fell away. I felt so cold and alone in the world that I wanted to scream. Each time it grows a little and I wonder at the entirety of the message. Will I ever again let my blinds open and permit entry?

I doubt it.

“When he comes, he comes in the flesh of another. He comes when you want him least. When he comes, he feasts on heartstrings,” Schwartzman’s mouth said with a voice not his own.

I jumped from the couch without a word and ran away. I cried to myself as I drove, my cellphone ringing crazily in the cup holder of my Nissan Patrol. Through the night I prayed to a god who was eaten long ago by the demons of the universe. I prayed so hard that, at times, I thought I heard his voice.

Love eventually demanded that I answer the ringing phone. I explained everything to Natasha, right from the beginning. I think she believed me when I told her a devil wanted to destroy everything that gave me pleasure. My mistake in this explanation was to make it about Natasha only.

Home, returned, dooming those who I loved.

December thirteen, my forty-second birthday. Natasha prepared a special meal. Caleb and me sat at the table, waiting.

“Two more minutes!” the call echoed from beyond the swinging kitchen door.

“About fucking time, eh Buckaroo?” Caleb said.

I fell from my chair. The boy’s voice had never been so concise and full. It would’ve almost been beautiful if it wasn’t for how it came about.

“You know, I did things to Kat before I cut her belly. I bet you didn’t know that. The old man was a little more agile than I made him out to be. Police ever ask you about that part, buckaroo? About the recent penetration of her anus?”

I stared up at Caleb in his motorized wheelchair, and he peered at me with the only full expression his face had ever made. It was sickening to think it took a devil to make the boy truly smile.

“I’m going to do worse to Natasha and I’ll never stop, because you’ll never catch me.”

I saw red all over, like a Dario Argento film. The cocky thing that tormented me was feet from my grasp. Of course, everything it said was part of a plan. Pawn that I was…am…

Onto my feet, I grabbed my steak knife and thrust it into Caleb. Blood spurted and shot, spraying the wall behind me in a Rorschach splotch. Righteously, I stabbed at the devil hiding inside Caleb. I stabbed at all the horrible things it said. I stabbed at all the terror and torment it mounted against me.

The scent of pulled duck and sweet curry filled the air. A heavy dish clanked on the floor and footfalls sprinted toward me. Natasha was a fighter. She was not a screamer, not prone to hysterics in the face of urgency. Her hands landed before I realized what the smells and sounds together amounted to and who was behind me. One set of fingernails raked my cheek and the other set dug into my hand. Instinctively, I jerked and sliced with a hooking backswing, knife still in my grip. Blood showered from Natasha’s throat in a washing red wave. I wore a slaughterhouse uniform of hot, hot blood, and when it was done, I did the only thing that came to mind.

I showered.

I packed a bag.

I left.

I can’t tell you where I’ve gone for obvious reasons. But this account is the truth of the devil that has been haunting me.

This morning, over the radio, Adele sang, “I'm in California dreaming about who we used to be. When he comes, he comes in the flesh of another. He comes when you want him least. When he comes, he feasts on heartstrings. All the heartstrings that touch your life.”

I’m alone and I’m afraid. I’ve been too scared to call my mother, the last heart connected to mine. She needs protection. I will get away and the thing will follow me.

Please, print this. Please.

You will find others like me.

I promise.

People will come forward. This devil rides my back and the backs of others, has to. Print this and the truth will come out. And please, check in on my mother.

—

The above arrived in our general mailbox, written on nineteen sheets of Trail Motel stationary, postmarked from the town of Baker City, Oregon. Our research suggests that this is authentic and is an eerily explicable account—so long as one can accept the fantastic as plausible—of the major events in Trent Alexander Morris’ life.

Lidia Harriet Morris, 69, of Walla Walla, Washington, is missing and presumed in danger.

If you have any information on the whereabouts of Trent Morris or Lidia Morris, please call 1-800-CALL-FBI.

If you have survived accounts like the above, please email our Devils Among Us inbox at devils@rollingstone.com. Get it all off your chest and let us help exorcise your demons.

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