Guillotine created the most perfect and wondrous invention that humanity has ever seen. Pure genius and beauty combined into streamlined purity. The guillotine captures my imagination and laces my dreams. If only I were as holy as the machine of mercy.

For only death is real.

We live in a world of dreams, dreams created by fools. Our world is a pageantry of lies and illusions; mastered by slaves to unreason. Behold a world deprived of such infection: my world. The world of catacombs, rich with skulls, the world where darkness cleanses and the silence soothes the aches of living noise. An older, more honest world.

Hello, my name is Aven Miller. I have experienced the most awful horror I could ever imagine. My sanity stood upon a glass floor of correctness. I could only abide that which is perfect and polite. Only a purity of culture could keep me tethered to benevolence and understanding.

My monster was chained by golden links of flawless personification.

By day I was a freelance journalist, starving and working very hard to write nearly ten thousand words per pay. Every word was worth a penny and I only got paid for a tenth of what I wrote. I spent hours on the phone and even longer increments of time on foot, researching and interviewing. Everything I sold became the core of news reports. Nearly everything that makes the news starts with the effort of someone like me.

I write what everyone reads, hears and says, because your world is a world of words. Mine is too, but I am the deeds behind those words, the steps, the ears and the keys that craft all of the stories everywhere. I was no different than the thousands of freelancers, except that to me, the written word was God. In my faith I found that only perfection would do.

I was not long for such rational and beautiful travels. I went where the stories took me, and with a passport to France, from America, I sat and waited. Nothing was more urgent to write about than the death of French culture. It would start, ironically, in the most culturally enriched city in the world: Paris.

I followed the harbinger of such a black plague. Her name was Emery Chilton. She was an American fashion critic, sent to Paris, much the way any disease is initially spread. I sat behind her on the plane, although she did not know I was there.

I dreamed of severed heads, talking to me, in French. I could understand them, as they spoke slowly for me. I had only studied their language for four months and I could barely communicate in French. I've always studied quick and late and had learned two languages already. French was just my latest conquest. Nothing is more attractive than the ability to express oneself effectively.

I believe that if you can say it only once - perfection. Why repeat yourself? You'll sound like a dancing fool. Mimes remain silent and they are impressive.

The voice of man is his will. Humility is greater than willfulness. The unyielding, the brittle, that is what breaks. The humble man endures. The silent man is endearing.

I remained silent and in her shadow. Except those moments when she was making a fool of me by being so bad at the most basic human skill: communication. The humane part of me had to step out from where I stood out of sight. I would appear at each conversation to translate for her and save myself the embarrassment of being her shadow.

As she spread insults, like a stray spreads fleas, I apologized in her wake.

"She is an American woman; rudeness is how she shows interest." I explained. Although what I said, in my very limited French was: "C’est une femme américaine; L’impolitesse est la façon dont elle montre de l’intérêt."

Indulgence is the only weakness that French people have, that I ever noticed. The men she insulted would willingly sleep with Emery Chilton. She was very promiscuous and slept with a variety of men in Paris, despite the fact that she was in a relationship. She'd left her boyfriend home in America.

Indulgence is also an American weakness. It is also my weakness. I wasn't interested in the wine or the sex or the awful rampage of offensive behavior. I just wanted the story. Chilton was a failed pop star and a debutante. People lived vicariously through her adventures. I was there to ensure that people's dreams continued, to protect the life they wanted to live. Internal life is as important as the life of the body. Perhaps more important, as what we write lives on after we die.

I felt dead inside. Emery had made me sick. I hated her and I hated what she represented. My loathing turned to fear as I realized I had changed. I was no longer held together by golden chains. No, my monster was out. Dread creeped up inside me as I knew that the news was not being written by me.

The murders had started shortly after our arrival in Paris.

Emery had immediately gotten drunk in public and gone to a nearby park to sing Sweet Home Alabama and cause a disturbance. She had even gone and hugged some children, a random drunk girl in a park violating people's personal space and touching their kids. It was then that I realized I hated the assignment. I had never felt hatred like that before, a kind of self-conscious and bitter loathing. It was laced with a deep terror that was slowly coming to a boiling point.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

I lay awake in my hotel room with a stress ball squeezed tightly in my hand. My room was across from hers and I had to listen to her dirty escapades. All I could hear was her rendition of Sweet Home Alabama in her day drunk voice. I felt like a dog that was scratching fleas for the first time. Disgust and horror mixed like a deadly poison, dripping from my saturated brain, bleeding from my pores.

I could smell my own sweat and so I took a shower. I could only think about opening the curtain to find Emery there. I would have a knife and I would swing it until all her chocolate syrup went down the drain. It was the only thought that would make me smile. I had always smiled in the shower. Paris was a first for me, frowning in the steam and hot water and soap. I like being clean.

Like plague bringers we went through the streets of Paris, spreading what we had brought from America. I felt dirty and vile, following her footsteps. When I was in my hotel room I couldn't write. I broke a vase when I threw my heavy rubber squeeze ball. I was feeling a new kind of stress.

Every day was more of the same. She would mock the good people of Paris, get drunk, make a fool of herself, look around, get helped by me, get a man to go home with her, go out at night for more of the same she had done all day. I was the one helping her. Whenever the language barrier got in her way I stepped in from nowhere and explained her and apologized and sold her. Selling her was my job, except I hadn't even written ten thousand words about her, despite spending days in Paris. The days became weeks. My funding ran out and I had to take a janitor's appointment in the apartment building she moved into.

Something was always broken in her penthouse. She never learned my name, although I could tell it annoyed her that one of her male acquaintances wasn't interested in sleeping with her. She annoyed me, and fearfully so, every time I saw her neck I wanted to put my hands on it and squeeze.

I would unclog her toilet and retreat to my pitiful accommodations. There I would strangle the rubber squeeze ball. I couldn't throttle Emery, so I felt a kind of fear. Some kind of oppressive depravation was suffocating me. I started blacking out.

The news was still happening and I was missing all the gold. A serial killer had hit the streets of Paris. Someone was killing off handsome young men all over the city. Someone was using a garrote. The men were getting strangled to death.

I noticed that all of them had slept with Emery.

Then I found a garrote in my drawer while I was looking for my passport. Fear gripped me and took away my breath. I looked in the cracked mirror and asked myself if I was losing my mind. I was so scared that I was killing and that I was unaware of it.

With the passport in one hand, the garrote in my pocket and the squeeze ball keeping me from a scream, I went. I went to the police in Paris and I told them in English that I thought I was going around killing people without knowing it. They didn't get it, they thought I was playing a prank, that my American humor just wasn't funny. I yelled at them:

"Je suis le tueur qui m’arrête!"

That made them laugh. I even showed them the garrote and they just blinked and shrugged. Like the haze of a nightmare, I went outside. I wandered the streets, imagining that I was capable of killing anyone I met and without memory. I wasn't sure how it was possible. I felt the chaos, it hurt. There was nothing perfect anymore, nothing pure, nothing sacred.

Nobody would ever understand anything I said. I could no longer communicate, because nobody believed me. Was I a fool or were they?

The bells of Notre Dame were silent. I wondered, as I stared at the fleshy architecture, if it was dead. I wondered if I could find the life of a fool, a happy life, speaking without thought, in the Court of Miracles.

I laughed and it came like a peal of deafness. Like hot molten lead my laughter came forth. I was a cracked bell, falling through the fragile scaffolding to crush the pile of dry bones that lay below me. I knew I was dead, something was wearing me like a meat puppet. Some butcher of sanity had divided my ugliness from my politeness. I had two faces, one of day and one of night. I was not a dog, I was a man.

I realized, with the clarity of a writer of a million words, that I could not communicate anything true with my typewriter. Once it was written, it became a lie. I was a liar. I was a dog.

Clearly now: every dog has his day, but every bitch has her night.

She met me there in the bar she had gone to that evening. I was not the same. I had embraced the horror, I had become the creature I was afraid of. The old me was left as a deformed abomination on the steps of Notre Dame, to be raised by holy men. My handsome smile was easily hers and she liked it easy.

I told her in French that I was going to kill her. I described that I was going to strangle her in the depths of loving. I explained to her that I hated her and I needed her to die, so that I could get back to life. I reminded her that I was her shadow and I promised her that I was ready to catch up to her.

She understood none of it, Emery just laughed and told me my French-speaking was sexy. I knew my French-speaking was broken and clumsy. I had only started learning French half-a-year-earlier. I shrugged and sipped my wine, never taking my eyes off of her.

The other people in the bar, Parisians, they had overheard my sinister attempts to warn Emery. They were watching us with horror. Neither of us really took notice. I was glad someone understood me, they did, they got it. Emery was just glad to have all eyes on her.

We went back to her apartment and she still didn't recognize me. I hadn't stopped smiling. She made no connection between the janitor, a man who wasn't interested and the doting lover I had transformed into. I was killing it.

We got into bed and I squeezed the rubber ball with both hands. I squeezed it and the facial muscles on it contorted. I liked the new look, she looked pretty.

I felt a lot better when it was all done.

I lit a smoke and asked her if it was as good for her as it was for me. She said nothing, probably because she was out-of-breath. I chuckled and offered her the smoke. When Emery didn't move, I stuck the fag into her lips and they tightened back up around it.

My thoughts went to the guillotine, such a perfect thing. So good.

I wondered, with wonder, if her brain was still alive in there. Would she blink and signal that she was still alive? It would be her most meaningful attempt to communicate. Nothing.

I sighed with satisfaction.

With the terror of not knowing who I was gone, I went home. I sat in my humble apartment and decided to take a shower. With her stench and diseases washed off of me I felt clean. I love cleanliness.

Fear and love in Paris. I felt the fear and I fell in love. What a wonderful place, what a clean city, for one so ancient. I marveled at my time there, in the shadows. I realized it was time to step out into the light. I was ready to wear the fool's crown and be a king for a day.

I sat down and began to write, smiling.