According to some self-proclaimed 'highly acclaimed authors' that you've probably never heard of, Tacoma and Pierce County are the place known as Methlehem. I must tell you they've either never done meth, or had a prostitute or murdered anyone or they have. So, in order for someone to know what they are talking about, they've either done these things or they haven't. Self-acclaim all you want and toot your own horn about how successful of a prosecutor you were, but really, what difference did you make?

Did you make a lot of money when you arbitrarily nicknamed your district after the real Methlehem?

I lived in Spokane in the very early 2000's and it was there that I became a murder addict. It really wasn't my own fault, although I accept responsibility for the lives I took. Really it was fear that governed my actions, for I was haunted by the specter of vengeance, and she would not let me rest until I had slit enough throats. If ever I defied her she would stop tormenting me and begin withering my very soul.

It is indescribable, what it feels like to have your soul seeping into the opened mouth of the sucking ghost, its bloody eyes holding you fixed in place, your essence pouring like a golden smoke into the maw of endless suffering. I will say that I succumbed to this, and to avoid it, in terror, I obeyed. In life she was a friend, but in death she was a wraith.

She'd asked me if I believed in such a thing, as though she somehow knew she wasn't going to survive the weekend. I thought she was going with her boyfriend, but he didn't go with her either. Instead, she went alone, or rather with a few girlfriends, but they abandoned her when she collapsed and the guys at Aaron's party told them they could leave, and without their friend. The girls got scared and left her behind.

She didn't survive.

Her boyfriend, Daniel, called me and asked me if she was with me. I said where she'd gone and he told me he was in front of my shack. I felt a cold chill, because she was already gone. I somehow knew she was dead, it's what happens when you love someone and they die a bad death. You just know.

We arrived at the abandoned house around noon, and let ourselves in. We found her tied naked to an old mattress. She was covered in bruises and they had left a beer bottle in her. She wasn't breathing.

After we told the police what we knew they went to question her friends. Daniel's cousin, Officer Vandeim, worked in Spokane's police, and due to the fact that the guys at the party were under investigation for all the meth going out of Spokane, they were not going to do anything about it. Making arrests for her murder would interfere with their bigger investigation. They strategically just shelved the case.

Daniel ended up in the hospital for alcohol poisoning and when I went to see him he was gone. He didn't make it. I was left without any friends in that city, the city of Methlehem.

I still had enemies, and for a man filled with rage, enemies can be just as good as friends.

Her ghost came to me, telling me what they did to her, how she had suffered for hours before she had a seizure and died. I was afraid of her ghost, how it would never let me rest, how it fed on me. Her spirit was vengeful, she had loved her life, she had loved Daniel and she had loved me. To her, we were all dead, and I was just a revenant.

That was my fear, of becoming a monster. And everything I did, or didn't do, kept making me worse and worse. By the end, I was addicted to murder, but only because of my modus operandi, and my target victims. An ordinary murderer isn't really addicted, just obsessed.

Allow me to explain how to hunt down and murder a group of men in cold blood and get away with it. I'll walk you through the step-by-step planning and execution of the murders I committed. I'm not afraid of the kind of prosecutors who describe their book as 'written by an acclaimed author and successful prosecutor'. Dude who wrote the book wrote that description of it. I've never heard of him, or her, or whoever. All the prosecution happens where things are civilized.

There's no meth in the courtroom, and nobody can imagine what the places they are talking about look like, smell like and feel like when they are in an expensive suit and in a courtroom, prosecuting the kind of meth dealers that go to court with an attorney, after getting taken alive, arrested by the police. I'm a goddamned meth vampire, and I can tell you exactly who I killed, how I did it and when and where and everything, and this ace prosecutor who thinks Tacoma is Methlehem wouldn't know what to do with this account.

The police know me, I get arrested or pulled over fairly often. Honestly, I like the police, because they look into my eyes and they smile a little bit at what they see. They arrest me and I get paraded in through where all their desks are and they stand up and watch me go by. Good luck bringing me to justice. I'm always out of county lock-up by Tuesday, with cash in my pocket, and all charges have been dropped. Every time.

Aaron was the only one I knew about, and I had no idea who he was.

I just sat in a cardboard tent across the street from where I'd lost and found my girl. I waited six days and started to think I would wait forever. Then, on the morning of the seventh day, just before sunrise, a car pulled up and a guy got out and went up to the porch and sat down and started smoking a cigarette. He left his lighter on the porch. The car drove off and left him there.

I couldn't believe one of them had returned to the scene of the crime, but why not? Their activities were entirely routine to them and they acted with impunity. It was possible they'd already forgotten why they might want to avoid that particular house.

With a claw hammer in my hand I stood up, dripping and sore. I had the cardboard shelter on me until I was halfway across the street and it slumped off. The guy tried not to react until it was too obvious I was coming straight for him. He got up and pulled out a gun and showed it to me, but I didn't care.

Ever have your soul supped on by a wraith? You kinda want to die, you're more afraid of what she'll take with her next feeding, rather than bullets.

He pointed the gun at me but forgot to take off the safety.

I was on the stairs, climbing to the porch. He was taking steps back, cussing at me and telling me he was going to kill me. He pulled the trigger on the revolver, but the first chamber was empty. I was crossing the porch. I raised the hammer like I would bring it down and he raised his gun hand in defense.

I wanted that hand, not his head. I put the claw of the hammer into his wrist. While he was feeling that I pried the gun from his hands. I opened the revolver and dropped the bullets onto the porch.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"We won't need those. I'm going to kill you so slowly, Jesus might resurrect you before I'm done." I told him. "It will take no less than all day and all night."

He just stood there blinking staring at the disheveled vagabond who had just chunked a claw hammer almost all-the-way through his wrist. Then he started screaming for help. I stood there until he was done, and then he collapsed to the porch whimpering in pain and terror.

I opened the door to the house and grabbed his hair and dragged him inside. He was begging me to take his money and let him go.

"Money?" I pretended to be interested. "How much money?"

"I'll give you eight hundred dollars man, it's all I got."

"Sorry, I need eight hundred and one dollars." I replied like we were haggling over the value of his life.

"I meant eight hundred and fifty man, I've got eight Franklins and a Grant. C'mon man, please?" He begged.

I found an empty beer bottle and handed it to him. "Eat it."

"What?" He started crying. I grabbed his wounded arm, twisted around behind his back and used the handle of the hammer to pull it up to behind his head until I'd torn his elbow out of its socket. He screamed in horrified anguish.

When he was just a whimpering and moaning mess on the floor I said:

"I'll let you live if you eat that bottle."

He refused, so I helped him out. I climbed onto his back and grabbed his hair. He was fighting back with everything he had so I got up off him and stomped on him repeatedly until he went still. He was still squirming a little, so I sat back down on his back, took the bottle, and placed it under his face. I reached around under his jaw and squeezed until he opened his mouth.

"What do you want?" He whimpered pathetically.

"Just a few things about your friends. If you decide you'd rather tell on them, I'll leave you alone and go get them instead." I said. He choked his agreement.

I rolled him over and dragged him to the old metal heater against the wall. I then used his belt to tie his remaining hand to the heater. I went and got the gun and put one bullet in it.

"We don't have long. You were waiting for someone. Who is Aaron?"

"He's coming." He coughed.

"And who are you?" I asked

"I'm Spider." He said. I shook my head. "I'm Gus Steelbrim."

"If you start giving me information that I cannot use to find your friends, then I'll think you are done talking and I'll shoot this bullet into your right eyeball and the low caliber won't be able to go out the back of your skull, it'll just bounce around in there and disintegrate your brain. If you keep talking and I believe you and I like what you are saying, I'll leave you there alive, and I won't bother to hunt you down and light you on fire like I'm going to do to your friends." I told him, I gave the chamber a little spin. "Want to play Russian Roulette? It might clear your head, help you remember names and places."

I took the gun, pointed it to my ear and pulled the trigger. I frowned. "I always go twice, gives me a boner." I winked, spun the chamber again and repeated my turn. "It's a really fun game, would you like to play, or do you have a few names already on the tip of your tongue?"

"You're crazy! You're so freaking crazy!" He was wide-eyed and panicked.

His phone started ringing and I took it out of his pocket. It was a Cricket, which meant all his associates were on a network. I answered it.

"Where are you? Are you in the freak house? We're outside with your stuff." Aaron said without me saying anything. I hung up and put the phone into my pocket.

I walked outside, took the lighter that was sitting there and picked up two more bullets off the porch and loaded them into the revolver and then walked down to the car, just as the sun was coming up. The passenger side window came down and two guys were in the car.

"Who the freak are you?" Aaron asked me. I raised the gun to the open window and shot the passenger into his nose and then shot Aaron twice, once in the neck and once in the side of his head. Then I tossed the gun into the lap of the passenger. I came around the driver's side and took the keys. I opened the trunk and looked for something more I could do to help make my point. I found a gas can in the trunk, but it was mostly empty.

"Good enough." I decided. I found that Aaron was still alive, although he had a gunshot wound in his neck and alongside his head. The damage was superficial, and he might have lived. Instead, I dragged him into the street and took the lighter and the gasoline. I poured the gas onto his crotch and lit his nuts on fire. Good enough.

His screams went on and on for quite some time while I tied one of his kicking feet to the bumper of his car. I put the keys back into the ignition and propped the gas pedal down. He was dragged to death.

This was done to Aaron Vicktor on April 20th, 2002 when he was dragged for three-quarters of a mile down East 29th Street at about six AM. I was the one who did that to him, it was me, premeditated as all hell.

I heard he was still alive for about two more hours in the hospital, where a nurse misread his chart that supposedly said he was allergic to all forms of pain medication known to man. Therefore, she just stood there and watched him die in skinless agony and did nothing for him. Not sure who she was, but I'm sure she knew who he was.

Every day I called another associate of Spider's and offered them a good deal on his stuff. They'd come to the freak house alone or with a friend and I would cripple them, hang them from a rope and skin them alive. I just tossed their dead bodies into the empty pool out back and left them there rotting in the sun.

The neighbors never looked outside or called the police or bothered me in any way.

I became addicted to it by mistake, as I got their blood in my mouth that first time I started butchering one of those nice young men while he was still alive and screaming himself to death. After that I had to have more. I started licking the blood, sipping it and then drinking it.

Then it happened. One day there was nobody left on that phone to call. I had more phones, but I wasn't sure who was who. I compared call lists and got outside the first Cricket business network they had going. The problem was that word had gotten out that the freak house was a slaughterhouse. Nobody wanted Spider's stuff, whoever tried to go get it was never heard from again.

I was fiending, cold and shaking. I needed more blood, more Meth dealer blood, it was the only kind that could sate my thirst. I looked in the mirror, and I had no reflection.

I had become so hollow, I was invisible. An empty shell, a husk of who I was, a discarded molt, a freak zombie who drank the blood of dying men. I was in a living nightmare, gripped by the horror of my deeds.

It was then that she came to me. She looked different. Like she was when I first met her, all gothic and sixteen years old. She used to come to my shack and make coffee for me and tell me stories about tiny creatures she believed in. I'd loved her very much and I was grateful for her friendship.

The monsters had caught her and killed her. Then, she'd caught me and made me a monster. Then I'd killed them all.

"I am sorry." She told me. And then she was gone. I wept, cleansing tears, the poisons leaving my body, and breathed in the cloud of whatever good in me was taken from me to make me turn bad. I felt much better, whole again, although all alone. I missed my friends very much.

I was sorry too, because all the carnage had done nothing to help me remember her or find peace - had done the opposite. Instead, I was this hideous beast, full of dread. I realized I had to somehow make it all go away.

I called Pierson's And Sons Gravel And Yard and told them I had an empty swimming pool full of dead meth dealers who I had tortured and murdered because they had killed a girl. Mr. Pierson told me they don't do business on Sundays because that is the Lord's Day. Therefore, they came and filled the pool with gravel, paved it over, scattered some beauty bark and put a swing set over it, but didn't ask for any money, because that would be doing business.

I checked into the drunk tank and they let me stay for five days while I became human again. The vampiric thirst diminished, and I could think about meth addicts without wanting to drink their blood. I shook and trembled and sweated and confessed to a score of murders while I was delirious.

I had to leave Methlehem, I needed to go back to where it rains. I moved to Seattle and lived there from then on. As I was leaving town in a stolen car that I had found abandoned on Knox Street, I got pulled over.

The officer told me he wasn't a traffic cop. I looked up at the strange thing to say and it was Officer Vandeim who had said it. He just stood there blinking at me behind his cop sunglasses.

"What?" I asked him.

"Give me the phone." He said. I reached out the window with the phone and he collected it into an evidence bag. Then without another word he went back to his car and drove off, leaving me there.

I never looked back at that city, at the city of Methlehem.