Out with the old…

By the time you see this, poor, pitiful reader, a new night will have fallen; a beautiful blackness born.

Right now (10.30am, Wednesday, October 30), the last material traces of the idiot who used to write this column are bubbling into non-existence in my wheelie-bin – which, needless to say, last night I crammed his almost-lifeless corpse into and submerged in hydrochloric acid.

(Sadists’ Weekly will tell you that a sulphuric solution is your superior flesh-dissolving agent, but hydrochloric, while a bit pricier and a nightmare for staining, is, in my vast experience, the only real choice for any serious satanic serial killer.)

Anyway, now the epoch of Emmet has ended and I, his usurper, wear his column as my crown, perhaps I should tell you a bit about myself.

Well, one thing that you ought to know about me is that I am a big believer in the idea that every good friendship has to be built on trust.

I mean, without trust, how would I ever have been able to lure my hundreds of victims to their grizzly deaths?

My early life was pretty normal – at least for people who grew up in my part of the underworld.

Very early on I was already displaying promising signs of the murderous psychopath that I would decay into.

Every parent hopes that their child will hit the big milestones at the right time, but – if my proud mother is to be trusted, which, being related to me, she isn’t – I was always way ahead of my peers.

As a newborn, people used to lurch over my buggy, look into my ice cold eyes, and say, “Oh, he is an utterly contemptible wee critter, isn’t he?”

When I said my first word, ‘disembowelment’, my grandmother’s heart actually exploded with pride, blowing a hole right through her sternum and smattering blood all over my crib.

I can still remember that metallic taste on my lips. Yum.

I was one of the fastest developers in the history of Hades, even in dietary terms, apparently: Off the teat by six months, eating solids by a year, and, before my second birthday, if you couldn’t smoke it from a glass pipe, I wouldn’t so much as look it.

Every parent-teacher meeting, it was always the same: “Mr and Mrs Malevolence, we have simply never seen a child that can put away so much crack cocaine at break time.”

Mother and father never got tired of hearing that. I mean, what decent parent doesn’t want the absolute worst for their child?

From then, things progressed upon a heartrendingly horrifying course.

By the time I was four, I had crucified my first family pet.

By eight, I had successfully paralysed one classmate, blinded two others, lead poisoned another, and caused umpteen fractures, dislocations, burns, contusions and lacerations.

I’ll never forget the day wee Benny Goodsmith said he’d tell the teacher if I didn’t stop ripping off his fingernails, so I dragged him into the toilet and cut out his tongue with a set of safety scissors.

Ah, looking back upon those days of childhood innocence would almost bring a drop of blood to my eye.

Oh, would you look at the word count already? Looks like I’ve got swept up in a river of nostalgia. Who said blood-thirsty sadists were incapable of a spot of rose-tinted retrospection?

Anyway, I best be off. Time waits for no man, and he who reflects too long will perish before the broken mirror of his bad luck.

So, toodeloo – I’m off to maraud the streets in search of my next prey. If you catch sight of me tonight, run – unlike with the charlatans at the Ulster American Folk Park, if you see me coming out of the shadows, you’re coming back in with me.