The Mosse Murders

The rain blanketed the quaint little town of Mosse; no car was left dry, no stray cat warm, and no back garden unflooded. The clouds were angry; they were always angry this time of year, Melanie thought to herself. She didn't like angry; it was sad and mean while being sickening and frightening, all wrapped up into just one feeling that she wasn't allowed to express but grown-ups were happy to show whenever they liked. Whether that be directed towards a driver plodding along too slowly or another driver cruising along too fast.

Melanie was eleven; she had all the characteristics of a common Mosse resident, but she wasn't the average height of the other residents on account of her being a child. She never quite understood the process of turning into an adult, age had something to do with it, but that still wasn't clear. Sometimes she was too young to understand adult jokes or why Mommy was crying, and other times she was too old to be crying herself.

Strike ten. Melanie's been counting the lightning, and that was the tenth. She watches with the curiosity of a cat at the living room window. She's a little damp despite being indoors; that's because she's had to throw on the pyjamas that have only just come out of the wash, and her hands haven't dried yet because Dad has forgotten to put the towels in the tumble dryer until late, so they've only just started spinning.

Strike eleven, the whiteness encapsulates the living room, and the entire front part of the house is flashed with a brilliant light, and then there is no light at all. Cowering behind the sofa, Melanie waits for the lights to come on; they don't. The lightning and thunder have left now, perhaps moved to the next town over. Dad calls it "shithole", but it's really called Overton. In the broad silence Melanie sighs; the house is quiet. It's usually not. A soothing rhythmic drumming sound from the tumble dryer in the garage vibrating against Dad's tool shelf and workbench relaxes her; she's at peace for a moment. Minutes pass by, the lights are still off, Melanie is far too afraid to walk around now, there's an ominous feeling in her home, and she knows something is not quite right. She doesn't like the feeling of two wrong-way jigsaw pieces lying next to each other; that's what her school therapist describes it as, and Melanie is inclined to agree.

Through the veil of darkness and sleets of rain outside, Melanie saw figure; it's big, and it's a he. No woman in Mosse is that broad-shouldered. Suddenly Melanie was not alone, but she's not happy; she knows it can't be Dad, and she was certain it wasn't Mommy, but amongst the thoughts flailing about in her mind, she's only really feeling uncertain, and she doesn't like uncertainty. It's the wrong-way jigsaws all over again. What was that thought? There was something important. 'Don't open the door to strangers' perhaps... no that's not it. What was it? Hide. That's it. Melanie has to hide, something should be hidden.

There are two knocks, abrupt; they cut through her thoughts, they slice through her uncertainty, and suddenly she's afraid, not of the figure outside, just afraid of what the figure outside might represent. Is it fear calling her, or is it perhaps death coming to claim her? Is this cousin Frederick who strokes Melanie's thighs at Christmas and birthday gatherings?

She feels a little sick again; she's felt sick ever since her parents started arguing in the garage, are they still arguing in the garage? No, they're not at home, Melanie upset them and they left in a rage.

A booming voice calls out, "Hello!! "Is anybody home?"

Melanie knows if she waits, the figure will leave, like when the mailman leaves parcels on the floor after pretending to wait and taking a photo of the front door.

"Only", begins the, now certainly older, man's voice, "I saw a set of eyes at the bay windows from across the street and wanted to offer a hand."

Well, there goes the idea of waiting. She swallows a dry clump of anxiety and shuffles over to the front door beside the sofa; she unlocks it and allows the man to enter. This is it, she thinks. It's the 'dark-cloaked dagger' from Dad's television programme, and he's come to get me, and it's all my fault because—

"Ello Melanie! Do you remember me?" The voice is warmer than she expected; it's no longer a commanding beacon of fear, but a friendly nice beacon, like a lighthouse. "Of course you don't, darling. What am I thinking? I was the old man on your roof throwing all the leaves out of the guttering!" He motions his hands around like a Tasmanian devil, miming a throwing motion, a "climbing a ladder" motion and other motions that really can't be put down to Melanie's charades skill as much as they can be blamed on the older gentleman's inability to move as fast as he talks.

Melanie shook her head. "N-" she attempted.

"Where are your parents then, Melanie? "Only I brought round one of my spare fuses; I managed to get the power on at my place just fine." He points a hairy finger; it's shaking uncontrollably, like when Dad gets angry. His finger pointing at a lonely house lit up among a desolate sea of darkened, powerless houses. Black. Hidden houses. Melanie remembers now, something had to be hidden, was it Mommy's wine bottle? She never liked that out on display for the other adults to see.

"Dad took Mommy to the superstore in Overton for—"

"Overton?" He queries, "What've they got that we haven't, huh?" The question didn't really have space for Melanie to answer before he presented his palm. "Benson," he states as he stoops down to her level. "Don't bother with any of that 'Mr B' rubbish, alright? I'm nothing special, just Benson." Melanie shook his hand. "You've got lovely soft hands, m' darling," Benson muttered as he stroked the back of her hand with his thumb. Melanie doesn't really like hand-holding or shaking, or touching or stroking. She only really likes Mommy's hugs because they're warmer, and Dad smells all the time, even after he's showered.

"Now look, you just sit down here on this chair," he gestures to the sofa, "and I'll have a look at your breaker box – you haven't known its whereabouts, have you?"

Benson talks like the hairy giant in Harry Potter. Melanie isn't allowed to watch those movies, but she did see the second one at her friend's sleepover the other week, and she's been playing the scenes over and over and over again in her mind, re-watching the movie to spite Mommy.

She had made up the first movie in her head after a few days and was quite determined that it was about the young girl who doesn't have any parents because she'd killed them with magic, and that this second movie she'd watched was about the boy with glasses who also had no parents so that must mean that the third movie would be about the pale ginger boy who does have parents, but he doesn't want any, so he makes them disappear. She doesn't know how he's going to do that just yet.

"Melanie?" Benson snaps. She'd phased out entirely again, thinking of her friend's house and the sleepover.

She obeys Benson's orders and sits on the sofa. It's cold now; it hasn't been long since the lights turned off, and now it's cold, so they must do a good job of heating up the room. That's certain.

"Breaker, breaker, breaker..." Benson mutters to himself, poking about the kitchen cupboards. He slides the biggest knife out of its knife block slowly, looking down at the floor tiles.

Melanie had a sudden realisation of where the breaker box was. She'd had another realisation, less sudden, more like an approaching realisation that you have to read like a highway sign when you're driving slow and can always make out the bigger letters and numbers first. Melanie didn't want Benson in her house; she doesn't like other adults, and she doesn't like Benson at all. Why doesn't she like Benson? She's never met him, has she? Melanie didn't care, she just wanted Benson out.

"Are you sure you don't know where this breaker is, Melanie?" Benson asks, interrogatively.

"No," she lies. "I don't know what a breaker is." She digs her lies deeper. "Is it meant to be broken?"

Benson has his fist balled up. "Where did you say your parents were, Melanie?" he quizzes.

"The grocery store"

Benson is approaching quietly, maintaining eye contact with little Melanie, his left fist balled up and his right hand gently maintaining grip on the knife. "What do they need from the grocery store?" What a pointless question, she thought.

"Well..."

Benson interrupts her again; "Overton is far away, they won't be back for a long time", he grunts to himself as his hand shakes, "I can look after you while they're gone". He stands now over her and raises the knife, then carefully takes out a small loaf of bread from his other hand and starts to saw at it. "And they best return with bread because this little nub left over is stale as a cinder block!"

He sets the two items down on the coffee table beside them and wanders back to the kitchen. "Do you watch any telly then, Mel?" He shouts over his shoulder, now feeling up the walls for the breaker box.

"Whatever is on in the morning, but not the news. I'm not allowed—"

"Whole lot of rubbish the news anyway, m'darlin'" He coughs out a lump of phlegm and spits it out. Melanie can't see where, but there certainly isn't a bin besides the garage door.

The garage door. It's scary; Melanie hates it. She'd always hated that door. Why does Melanie hate the garage? It has something to do with Benson, Benson and her in the garage.

"Oh, the garage – of course that's where it'd be! I'd totally forgotten your ditzy father even had one!"

Melanie felt uneasy. Melanie felt like there were lots of jigsaw pieces that didn't match, she was trying to piece together her brain, she felt faint and weary but alert and agile all at the same time.

Benson felt around for the breaker box. "Definitely..." he began to mutter to himself, "on one of these 'ere four walls." Benson felt tools, some sharp, some blunt, some cold and damp, and others of a softer, perhaps wooden, texture. He was a good man, Benson; he's just made some bad choices. Benson was about to make another bad choice on this day, but it's not entirely his fault; it's just the way he was brought up.

Bump.

"Dear me, I've..." His voice faded from an outside-speaking voice to an inside-speaking voice, and the rest of the sentence was mostly inside his head. '...bumped my bad knee into their bleeding pickup,' he thought. Clumsy. Benson doesn't work on roofs anymore because he's clumsy; in fact, he was only doing a favour to Richie – that's Melanie's dad – in the first place. But getting that ladder up to the right level to see into Melanie's room was the real reason he had offered a 'hand'. He loved watching her. Watching her play, watching her go out with her parents. Benson hated Richie; he was a cock, a wifebeater for sure, poor Marianne, and if the town gossip is false on that part, then he was definitely an avid drunk. No more than two years prior had Richie ran over Benson's prized British Short hair, the selfish bastard.

"Aha!" he exclaimed, this time in his outdoors voice. He slipped a fuse out, dug around in his pockets for his new one, and replaced it. "-and that should be..." he grunted as he tried to force the lever upwards; it's rusty. "It!" The lights come on with a flicker. The garage was dimly lit, with only a shitty little white bulb hanging just above the family pickup truck. "How'd your mom and dad leave for Overton without their pickup, Mel?"

The garage is red. "Say, Melanie, did your mommy paint this? Only-" Benson looked around. Marianne's lifeless body was cuddled up against the truck tyres, her fingers were broken and splayed in all different directions, and her dress was ripped up and soaked in blood. Knife wounds wouldn't describe it; a butcher couldn't have done a better job. It wasn't so much precise stabbing; just a vast amount of them in such a small space meant you really couldn't see where one knife wound began and another ended. Her once-blue dress was a dark crimson red, the blood ran down to her feet and pooled in-between her toes.

Richie was bent over the hood of the truck, his eyes... Benson threw up in his mouth. His eyeballs were outside his skull, his tongue cut off, and his nose slashed halfway horizontally, hanging on by about a third of his skin, open and on a hinge, exposing his innards. Benson let his vomit drool down his shirt, his mouth open just slightly. Richie's trousers and underwear were down to his ankles. Marianne's dress was only up to her lower back, her naked buttocks exposed. Benson tried to piece it together. It was like a scene from his crime documentaries on Netflix. Clearly Richie was sexually assaulting Marianne, but her underwear isn't in the garage or near her, so she wasn't wearing any this morning. Then Richie probably got rejected from his drunken advances and snapped, maybe hit her too hard, and she likely got knocked out from the fall, then...no that can't be right, why would Richie take his pants off and then start working on the truck, and wait, how can he kill his wife Marianne while having no eyes. Someone else must...

The lights went out again. Benson felt cold instantly; the darkness was impenetrable.

"We are gathered here today..."

Crows await the funeral service to be over. They stand proudly possessive of the local weeping willow. The graveyard is full; almost three hundred people attend the funeral of Benson Blemmish. Mosse only has five hundred residents, and it's a school day so a good lot of them are there.

"And not just that," began the pastor, "but a kind man. A solid man. Benson was there for me when my wife Laura died; he was there for the entire elementary school when they needed labour done on the fence; he was always fond of that school. Benson did a whole lot more than any of us for our kids! That's another thing we can't doubt."

Benson loved children. He had a childlike heart; his parents raised him to love children and take care of them. His mother was a childminder, a nanny in the holidays and a schoolteacher. His father was a psychoanalyst.

"Of course I can't gloss over the kind-hearted nature of Benson when he gave his only child up to Richie and Marianne, as they were infertile, and Benson knew – being a single man – that he couldn't do as good a job.

Benson loved children, and he loved his daughter most of all. He would always do odd jobs for Richie. After the adoption papers were signed, he regretted his decision. Richie drank, Marianne slept, and Melanie paid the price. Benson had to watch, he purposefully took a home opposite, took jobs for Richie, but his offers to babysit were always rejected, he was being pushed away over the years, and by the time Melanie hit just four years of age he wasn't allowed to see or speak with her.

[Live on Channel 3]

"And you're live with us here at Channel 3 covering a disturbing case of murder and malice in the quaint town of Mosse, where three adults were brutalised, severed and stabbed over ninety-two times. Over to you, Mae."

Mae was a pretty TV presenter; she wore a low-cut pencil skirt and black high heels. "That's right, just last week after a town-wide power outage two residents, Richard and Marianne Plumme, were brutally murdered. The tragic tale only gets more disturbing as a local neighbour and good Samaritan, 'Benson Blemmish', visited the Plumme's, likely after hearing a commotion from the murderer, and in his efforts to help them, was murdered alongside the victims. Benson's body was found just thirty minutes after the murder took place, following a 999 emergency call that the Plumme daughter Melanie made out of fear. Melanie, do tell us about that."

Melanie was sat up, a faint frown on her face, her outfit childlike and playful, with colourful wristbands on and her mother's necklace around her neck. Her guilt was hidden well.

"It was awful, miss. I heard the noises downstairs while I was in my bedroom doing my homework, and because the power went out, I was too scared to go down. Well, then the power came on, and..."

"Go on, you brave... brave girl."

"Well, the front door was open, and I don't think the killer stayed around, but that's when I went to the garage and saw Mommy and Papa—" she's swallowed her lies and guilt deep down, "and then Mr Blemmish; well, then I saw what they did to him..."

"What did they do to Mr Blemmish, Melanie?"

"Well, they had taken his head off, and they put it inside his stomach that they opened... and..."

"That's all we have time for today!" Mae begins, "But do tune in to our special later tonight on the Plumme-house murder to hear live on TV what Melanie saw that fateful night!"