The Butcher

As you may have figured out, I have somewhat of an imagination, and I enjoy creating stories and telling them. So it should come as no surprise that I craft stories about people in my daily life with whom I have little to no interaction with. Take my neighbor for instance. Well, back up. Mountain communities are notoriously close-knit, and many of them don't adjust well to people moving there from the valley. When Husband and I moved into our neighborhood we weren't exactly welcome with open arms. We still aren't especially popular with our neighbors due in large part to the fact that we party it up on weekends and we're on the younger side and we don't have kids. We're always respectful of noise levels at night, but some of our neighbors think that since they live in the mountains it should be quiet all the time. Well, we live in a neighborhood just like in the suburbs. If there weren't huge trees everywhere and they sky weren't so blue you wouldn't even know you were in the mountains. If you want solitude you need to buy property to insure that you won't have neighbors close by. Okay, now you know about our neighborhood. It's our across the street neighbor who is the subject of this story.

Since we moved in the neighbor across the street has always struck me as odd. And I don't know that any of my suspicions are correct, but it's so fun to speculate! When you move into a new neighborhood you try to meet your neighbors, in the very least you wave to them and say hi. The neighbor across the street, hereby known as The Butcher, has never acknowledged my numerous attempts to say hi and wave to him. That's the first oddity. The Butcher drives a very small car, two wheel drive, with at least five antenna on top of it. The reason I bring this up is because it snows where we live, and having four wheel drive is practically a necessity. The Butcher has a huge truck. But rather than drive the truck he uses it to back up and down the driveway when it's snowing to plow a path for his Geo Metro. The Butcher will spend upwards of 45 minutes carving tracks into his driveway. And when he drives the Geo through the snow, forget about it. You better watch out 'cause he ain't. He drives like a madman! During the summer The Butcher will open his front door and turn his music up so loud that we can hear it clear as day inside our house. Sometimes it's good music so we don't mind. But regardless, it's just kind of odd behavior yet again.

So I had been observing the comings and goings of The Butcher for a couple of months upon moving in to the house. He kept strange hours, coming and going in the middle of the night, sometimes being gone for a couple of days. Then one sunny summer weekend I was gardening in the front yard. The Butcher had several long plastic tubes, like one would use for plumbing or maybe a swimming pool. These tubes were very long though, and The Butcher doesn't have a swimming pool. I continued to watch trying to figure out what he was doing. It appeared that he was cleaning the tubes out, and doing a thorough job at that. The wheels in my head began to spin and a story was weaved out of whole cloth. BUT . . . it's a story that makes more and more sense with each passing day and new discovery.

The Butcher keeps a dungeon under his house. The dungeon is full of young women, teens and early twenties. They are chained up and tortured until The Butcher is done with them, and then they are unceremoniously dismembered and either 1)kept in large fridges to be distributed as meat for human consumption 2)kept in the same fridges until The Butcher eats them or 3)somehow disposed of by means of a wood chipper or acid vats.

See, he turns up the music when he's torturing them so no one will hear the screams projecting from the basement. He may also use this technique when he is chopping them up. There is still some argument as to whether he uses a chainsaw or carving knife. Now he may use an electric knife, but that wouldn't require loud music to mask the sound. The tubes are used probably to drain the blood from the dungeon. There is some speculation that they may also be used as a conduit for poison, which is what actually kills the girls.

At this point you may be wondering, where and how does he get these girls without being seen? Ah, my friends, this is where it gets interesting. Also in our neighborhood there lives a man who purchased a stretched Hummer limo, which he chauffeurs to make money. I have seen this very limo, on many occasions, full of girls in their early twenties who are drunk off their asses. Limo man just happens to be friends with The Butcher and often drives the limo to The Butcher's house. Not to go for a drive, Limo Man just parks it there while, I don't know, they have tea and crumpets.

Last night our power went out for several hours. The entire street, the entire neighborhood was dark. Every house, that is, except The Butcher's. As soon as the power went out he had his whole-house generator running. Why? To keep the fridges cold of course! You can't go to all that trouble to cut up dead bodies and store them in cold storage just to have the power go out and ruin everything. He also may have some sort of forced-air system for the dungeon to keep the girls either too cold or too hot.

Of course I have no proof of these allegations. That's why I observe. I'll tell you what though, when they find the dead bodies buried in the back yard, or the vats of acid with pieces of bone floating in them, and the cops come to question us, I won't be that person who says, "He was such a quiet man who kept to himself. I just can't believe he would do this."
I'll be the one who says, "I knew it all along."