I picked Mandy up in my arms, and carried her over to some sand-dunes nearby. She was beautiful… when I look at Mary, I see Mandy. They’re very similar in appearance. I placed Mandy down on the dune, so that she was lying on her back, and sat next to her for a few minutes, just looking at her. Then I started touching her. I ran my fingers through her long, dark hair, but I quickly stopped doing that, because it was soaking wet, and there was sand and stuff stuck to it; the texture offended me a little, if I’m being honest. Not Mandy’s hair, you understand, but everything else, especially the wetness and that gritty sand. I couldn’t help but notice that she was… well, you know… big… in the chest. I tried to stop myself, but I ended up running the palm of my hand across her tits. I felt the hardness of Mandy’s nipples, underneath the bikini top, and, well, you know how it is, I started to get aroused. I bet you think that you know what happened next. But you’d be wrong.

I know that I’ll go down in history as being an evil little cunt, and nothing more than that. Let’s face it, it’s what the people want! Black and white, no grey areas, everything clear-cut, no messy bits, please. That’s what they’ll get… Howard Trenton, the cold, heartless killer of the Black Pathway Trail… the devil personified… and all of that sort of shit. Except it ain’t always like that, things aren’t so simple as what people would like them to be. I’ve killed a lot of people, and will continue to murder, if I don’t get caught, but I’ll tell you something else, too… a concept that might surprise you. There is some goodness in my soul. It’s not all completely black. Sometimes, I can do the right thing, and for the right reasons too, and not just out of self-preservation, or through some hidden agenda. So I’ll admit it. For a few minutes, out on those sand dunes, with Mandy, I seriously, SERIOUSLY, considered just taking her. It would have been a cinch! She was spark out, half-dead, probably fucking comatose, Mandy would never have known. Yet I never did. Apart from those few seconds, where I felt Mandy’s breasts through her clothing, I never laid a fucking finger on her. I could have. But I didn’t. And that’s because some sort of moral code, deep down inside, emanating from a decent, wholesome part of my soul, buried under all of the other nasty, vicious shit, emerged to the fore. Like I said, it’s not always black and white. It doesn’t work that way.

So, I never raped Mandy. What I did do, instead, was try to save her, bring her around from her unconsciousness. I thought that the best way to do that would be to warm her up, coz her whole body was trembling with cold, after being in the ocean for fuck knows how long. I rolled Mandy onto her side, and then I took my T-shirt off, placing it over her upper body. Then I cuddled up behind Mandy, wrapping my arms across her body, pulling her close to me, in the hope that my body heat would transfer across. There was never anything sexual about any of this. I simply thought that, if I could warm the girl up, then she’d come around. The intention was to save Mandy, not kill her. Except that’s what I ended up doing, and completely by accident. I killed her.

At that point in my life, I didn’t know what had really happened to my mom, and so had no idea about my father, or one of the powers that he’d passed on to me through his genetic code. I huddled up to Mandy, trying to make her warmer, but the exact opposite started to happen; she started to get colder, and at the same time, so did I. When I first realised what was happening, I tried to pull away, but it was as if my body wouldn’t let me do that. Instead, I just hugged at her even harder, and with that, the coldness between us intensified. I felt a new sensation, one that I’d never experienced before… it was similar to sexual arousal… no, it felt exactly like sexual arousal… but in a different way to, say, what had happened a bit earlier, when I’d touched at Mandy’s breasts, or how it was with Kate Williams, up in her bedroom, when she fucked me. With this new, strange form of arousal, I just wanted to pull Mandy closer and closer to myself, because I knew that as I did, the cold… the icy, beautiful sensation of cold… would increase. The colder that we both became, the more my heart raced and my body trembled, just like it does when you’re about to shoot your load, during ‘normal’ sex. We were both freezing cold, and I couldn’t stop pulling Mandy closer, closer… it was like the ice was welding us together. Then it happened… a feeling like something being ripped from deep within my guts, and jolting across, into Mandy. The whole sensation was real; I actually felt her body jerk, just once, but hard, really hard, as the whole experience reached its peak.

I lay there, with Mandy, for another ten or so minutes, feeling exhausted, yet exhilarated at the same time. I started to feel warmer, but, to my dismay, Mandy remained the same; frozen. I let go of the young girl, pulled right away from her, thinking that might help, but it didn’t. I checked her pulse again. For just a few, short seconds, I felt it flutter inside her, and then there was nothing. Mandy was dead. That was the moment that I realised I had killed somebody for the very first time, even if it was by accident. I stood up, and looked down at the young girl, not knowing what to do next. That’s when my instinct of self-preservation kicked in. I knelt down and hoisted Mandy over my shoulder, walked away from the sand-dune, and carried the girl back to the ocean. I knew that, if I threw Mandy back into the water, it would wash off any incriminating evidence that I might have transferred to her, so that’s exactly what I did. I flung the dead girl into the sea, and then I watched as the tide began to drag her body away from the secluded beach. I walked away, back towards Coldsleet, passing the rock-pool that Mandy had been half-submerged in. I caught my reflection as I looked down at the water; my eyes were glowing a dull, dirty yellow.

They never did recover Mandy. Sometimes, I try and guess what might have happened to her body, but I can’t. I don’t like dwelling on the whole incident too much, really, because it should never have happened. It wasn’t a murder, but no-one will ever see it that way. At least I know the truth though, in my heart, that I was actually trying to save her. There was one time, about a month after the whole event had occurred, when I seriously considered writing a letter to Mandy’s heartbroken parents, just to put their minds at rest, give them some closure, so that they could start over again, and get on with their lives. In the end though, I thought it was too risky, and just left the whole matter alone; self-preservation again, I suppose. I didn’t want to draw any unwanted attention to myself.

I found out Mandy’s name the next day, in the local newspapers. She wasn’t from the locale; Mandy was a holidaymaker, on vacation with her parents and younger brother. She’d gone out swimming, but had gotten into difficulty, and was carried away by the strong currents around the Hingley coastline. I was shocked to discover that this had all happened the day BEFORE I found her. Mandy must have been tough, to survive all of that time in the sea, before being washed up on the shore near Keln. That just made what happened to her all the more sad, in my eyes. If I hadn’t interfered, she might have made it. But no, I had to get involved, and do more damage than good. It took me a long time to get over that. I carried around a lot of feelings of guilt. Unfortunately, I also carried around a growing desire to experience that feeling, the one of a frozen, intoxicating union, with a female, again. I resisted my inner temptations for about a year, before that resolve completely collapsed. You know what happened next, and once it did, well, I just couldn’t stop after that.