Baxter Savage: All Hallows Eve, Carving More Than Pumpkins – CAW 8.5

Tagged: cannibalism, murder, death, cooking

Introduction:

Baxter Savage, a serial killer seeking to right the wrongs in his past kills for peace of mind, to put at ease his morose ponderings and possibly manage the guilt he feels.

It’s a short story, so be warned.

Baxter Savage: All Hallows Eve, Carving More Than Pumpkins – CAW 8.5

To derive a sense of pleasure from the screams, as blood curdling and fearful as you could possibly imagine, a mass of flesh lay in a crumpled pile beside the front door of Baxter’s house. He systematically took chunks of it off the bone and deposited them in two different piles, with hair and without. His hunting knife peeled the tender meat off each bone until there didn’t exist another morsel to salvage.

Murder became a pastime for twenty year old Baxter Savage, a skill he honed up to the present day and several years beyond his ability to carry out the desires of his depraved psychosis. But today, a turning point was reached. The last tether connecting him to his sanity was frayed and detached from what he dared to hold on to, a woman. Someone special to him. His reason for living and keeping a sane disposition. Losing her caused something to snap sparking off a killing spree which spanned for fifty years.

Today, we join him at an all too intimate setting with one of the last players eliminated, chopped and drained into a succession of buckets, woven baskets, colanders and mason jars. His mind reeled on an insane unrelenting delusion, that somehow by taking the lives of everyone who was responsible for his moral decline, he would not be blamed for any of his actions prior to and following the accidental loss of life of the only person he ever truly loved.

He gathered up the bits and bobs, throwing them into an ends bucket then rolled up the overlapped carpeting before he took it outside to his truck and laid it in the flatbed. Returning to the house, the bland scent of coagulated blood met his nostrils like a slap to the face. Luckily it was dark outside because he wanted the various containers to be stored beside the rugs instead of inside the house. Working alone, he took several trips to his vehicle loading the glass, plastic and metal meticulously.

Baxter created rows for each type of red human meat, head, arms, legs, chest, stomach, back, and individual jars for the victim’s organs. “It’ll keep cool out there in the meantime”, he laughed before entering his house. After all, it was the day before Halloween. The days and nights were colder as winter threatened to approach. If any of this was going to succeed according to plan, it required an early start. He scrubbed the floor working up a profuse sweat and soiled his shirt in the process. Upstairs, the shower ran for exactly five minutes as his body was washed of any traces it carried from downstairs and the subsequent murders, quite brutal and messy to be honest.

The knife he used to dismember the man laid on the floor of the stall, bathing in his discarded lather to get itself clean. Mr. Savage stretched out and dressed in running clothes, a pair of shorts, muscle shirt and sneakers. He went back to his bedroom for a little rest and woke upon hearing his alarm clock buzzing. It was already two in the morning. Time for the show to start. His grogginess wore off when he recalled the jars. There was an old campsite in the mountains where he planned to spend a weekend and brought everything there along with a tent, firewood, an extra set of winter type clothes and enough lighter fluid to ignite his fire and the grill, with some charcoal briquettes.

He reached the site in record time, pitching his two person tent and using an axe to chop the carpeting into manageable pieces. Baxter fed them into the fire and brought it to a scorching inferno, having surrounded its perimeter with rocks, a little wood and the chunks of carpeting. All of it charred to ash before daybreak, hiding the bulk of his evidence. He continued burning up some of the ends and pushed the wood to the center as the flames smoldered to nothing. The grill was going with human remains searing to a crisp. Mr. Savage tasted the basted and seasoned meat, enjoying the way it rolled on his tongue.

Nothing compared to it, though a slight bitterness lingered after the first couple pieces were consumed. Halfway through his supply he decided to dump the rest inside of the fire pit, lit it again and watched the remainder disappear, shriveling as it did with the colander, baskets and buckets. The jars were placed back inside the flatbed as he made sure every last one of them was empty. “Now that that’s done, I will take up my tent and head further up the mountain.” He gazed toward the peak, steering away from the cliff’s edge as he drove.

Baxter grabbed each jar and threw it over the side of the mountain, smiling pleasantly at each satisfying crash. He spent another hour watching the town peacefully waking from its slumber, seeing them from his vantage point. The only thing left to do was sacrifice himself and that would happen in due time. But now, he strolled back down the mountain to his home about a few hours away. “No one will figure it out” he chuckled to himself and left the campsite as it was, dirt was poured onto the fire with the logs tossed once again onto the border of the site, near where the curb normally would be along the roadside.

The fire was died out, his truck was spotless and he knew he had a couple phone calls to make. Affairs needed to be settled. Maybe he’d admit to it all beforehand. Who knows? The drive was relatively uneventful, leaving him and his thoughts to coexist.