Harold Turvey was an ugly man of mind and soul.
Harold Turvey was cruel, vindictive, a man who found fault in all he saw and blamed his cursed life on all he knew.
Drops of venomous hatred glistened beneath his friendly appearance, filling his soul to overflowing.
He liked to inflict pain, a character trait he had inherited from his mother and father.
It was probably the only thing he was really good at.
Ask his wife, she’ll tell you just how good he was at coming up with new ways to torture her both physically and mentally.
Her broken fingers were the latest testimony to Harolds imagination.
It had taken him three hours to crush her finger joints with the pair of pliers her dad had given him for his birthday last year.
She tried to ignore the constant, agonising pain as she stared at herself in the mirror, slowly pushing her hair back from her eyes and trying to remember how she had looked before Harold had broken her nose two years ago.
One thing she had learnt from Harold was how to become an adept liar.
She had a whole box full of reasons for her injuries that she told her family and countless excuses for not being able to go out with them when they asked.
But her lies were wearing thin, she saw it in their eyes when they came to visit and heard it in their voices when they rang.
They weren’t stupid, they could see the pain and fear hiding behind her eyes when they saw her but if she told them the truth, she knew that Harold would kill her and them as well.
He was seriously unstable and dangerous, this much she believed about him.
The rest was a facade he had built up over the years to fool people and lull them into thinking he was good and decent man and he was very accomplished at it.
God knows she had fallen for it.
When they had met, she fell instantly in love with the man who was kind and considerate towards her, always bringing her flowers or some other symbol of his love and devotion towards her.
She had fallen for this fantasy about him and truly believed him to be all he portrayed himself to be, until their wedding night.
Once they were alone on the rented honeymoon boat out in the middle of the ocean, he had taken of his mask and revealed his true self.
It had been an horrific experience.
He had raped and sodomised her many times that night and in the morning threatened not only her own life but that of her family as well if she told anyone about what he had done.
She only had to look into his cold grey eyes to know he was telling the truth.
She knew she was trapped, imprisoned in a cold, dark room of fear.
They had been married now for six years and in that time he had broken her fingers, ankles, toes, four ribs, her nose, pulled out some of her finger nails, gave her numerous black eyes and made sure she would never be able to have children.
She didn’t like to think about that last one, the memories of the things he had inserted into her made her shudder with revulsion.
It was christmas eve and Harold Turvey was coming home from the pub, drunk and in good mean spirits.
He knew his wife would have his dinner dutifully waiting for him at home
As he fiddled with the bottle of super glue in his coat pocket, he smiled as he thought of giving her a christmas present she would remember for the rest of her miserable life.
He had never loved her, had never felt love for anyone in his life.
He had married her because he knew she would be compliant and feared him enough to not tell anyone of the things he did to her.
If you asked him why he did these things he would not be able to tell you.
It was as natural to him as eating and he enjoyed it.
As far as he was concerned, his wife deserved it, maybe even liked it.
His parents had taught him to hurt others before they hurt you and this he did very well.
As he walked down the alley way towards his car, he saw a woman standing on her own waiting for a customer.
Why not, he thought, it is christmas after all.
After negotiating the price, he followed her deeper into the dark alley until they reached a place where they would not be seen or heard.
He had not been gentle with her, he had left her lying unconscious on the ground bruised, broken and bleeding inside.
When he got home he had a shower, enjoyed the lovely dinner his wife had cooked him and after watching a little T.V., he belt her black and blue then went to bed.
He never woke up again.
The police said he had died of a heart attack, gave their condolences and left her to bury her husband.
After the funeral, after her family had left and she was finally alone, she took off the mask of the grieving widow and laughed and laughed and laughed.
She had not killed her husband although she had wanted to many times.
She wished she had had the courage to give him back some of the pain he had given her but she didn’t, it was a stranger who had given her her freedom.
Just before the funeral, the police had contacted her about her husbands wallet that had been found beside the dead body of a hooker found in an alley way not far from the pub he often went to.
The police said that either he was a customer and she had stolen it from him or that he had lost it, most probably the latter as they couldn’t imagine someone like Harold Turvey cheating on his wife who, he told everyone, he loved until his dying day.
She had almost told them what he was really like but they probably wouldn’t have believed her.
He had fooled everyone into believing he was a great guy who loved his wife completely and was totally devoted to her.
Funny how people will believe what they want to, even when deep inside they know it isn’t true.
It was the hooker who had killed him.
She had had both aids and gonorrhea but unfortunately he didn’t live long enough to suffer an agonising death from either of them.
Before they had met, she had smoked the last of her crack and went to score some new stuff from her dealer for the price of a blow job.
The new stuff was anything but a drug to escape with.
Unbeknown to her, her dealer had been trying to come up with a new drug, a new market and whole lot of new cash.
He hadn’t been brave enough to try it himself so he had experimented on some of the rats that lived in the condemned building in which he had set up his lab.
By the amount of dead, decaying rats that littered the ground outside the window, he hadn’t yet got the right mix of chemicals.
Sure it mimicked the high someone usually got from crack until it reached the heart, causing a cardiac arrest and leaving no trace it was ever in the system.
It would have been great if he was into assassination or something but it was useless as a drug to escape reality with unless you never wanted to come back.
After satisfying her dealer who left her waiting while he went to have a piss, she had scraped some of the new lethal powder into a tissue which she placed in her bag to have later.
She didn’t know some of it was still under her finger nails when she scratched her last customer as he raped and beat her.
Her last thought as she lay on the ground watching him fasten the belt of his pants and walk away, was to hope that he would die that day as she now felt her self doing.
She got her wish and both she and Harold’s wife had the last laugh.