My symptoms had been getting steadily worse for almost a year by the time I was brought in for questioning. I’d been in denial for at least eighteen months at that point. It was easy to hide from other people because my profession is an extremely solitary one. The very few people that I do meet invariably don’t have the chance to even see my face — and if they do, and I do my job right, it’s the last thing they ever see. My reputation precedes me, you might say. My clients all come via word of mouth, and I vet them extensively before entering into communication. When we do make contact, it’s via end-to-end encrypted text-only communication piggybacked onto the protocol of a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. Payment is 70% up front, with the balance due immediately upon confirmation. My rates are… well, probably higher than you’d ever believe. But I’m very, very good at my job. I noticed the first sign that something was wrong in late Autumn, the year before last. I’d been clearing leaves from my property’s rear lawn, leading down to the lake. Trees border the house on every side, for obvious privacy reasons, so there’s always a lot to gather up. I did a good job, divided the leaves between the composting bin and the municipal garden waste, and went back inside to rehydrate. Coming back in the living room, I looked out to admire my handiwork — and I saw a handful of new leaves had drifted down during the last few minutes. This would be at about 15:45. I didn’t have dinner that night until almost 21:00, hands shaking by that point. I stood out there for hours, chasing and catching leaves as they fell, unable to tolerate the idea of even one still lying on the grass. I slept fitfully that night, and was up literally at dawn to go out again and gather more. In the end, I closed the blinds in the living room so I just couldn’t see beyond the glass. The other problems came later. I put a bullet in the left side of the chest of a man who was going to testify against an agricultural chemical manufacturer, as requested, but for the first time ever, the asymmetry of it really bothered me. I put another one in the right side of his chest too, as accurately as I could. I had to go upstairs in his house and lean over the balcony to get the right angle and distance. As the weeks and months went on, the changes in my life became more concerning. I garrotted a prosecuting attorney in her own back garden, after watching her push her kid on a swing set three different times. The girl didn’t even notice. I pushed the kid seven more times myself, so that it would come out to a nice even ten. The number seemed to be of overriding importance. A month later, I was leaving a hospital where I’d killed a retired judge who’d been in for an aortic stent, and another patient’s visiting relative noticed me flicking the room lights off and on, off and on, off and on until I could be absolutely certain I’d left them the same way I found them. Blood and brain matter were becoming a problem. I’d always disassociated myself from the biological mess involved in my work — and I was extensively immunised against blood-borne infectious diseases, naturally — but I started to find that after taking a life, I perceived everything I wore as contaminated. In a way, that’s a useful mindset if you want to avoid leaving evidence, but it quickly became intrusive. At a particularly low point, I got rid of an excellent and untraceable .33-calibre ceramic pistol just because my screwed-up mind insisted that it had invisible germs on it. The thing is, I love my work. Always have. I see it as a series of fascinating puzzles to be solved, with the reward for perfection being the final kill. I approach everything as a professional, and I’ve amassed a staggering amount of research on dozens of topics that have come in useful at one point or another. I’ve killed people with bullets and explosives and poisons, of course, but also with foods, vehicles, appliances, viruses, barometric pressure, exotic gasses, triggered seizures, allergies, direct application of electricity, suffocation, genital trauma, and once — and I admit I was improvising — even with the R through S volume of a beautifully bound encyclopaedia set. I’m an artist. I truly believe that. And like any artist, I do sometimes suffer from periods of reduced inspiration, or low mood, or existential ennui — but most of the time I can cure any of those feelings either with a long bike ride through the woods, cooking a full meal at home from scratch, or killing someone in a particularly elaborate or perverse way. The OCD crept up on me, and I have no idea where it came from. I visited my doctor and was prescribed some medication, and I did take a single pill before I researched the possible side effects. Then I put the rest of them into the waste disposal. I can’t afford to lose my edge due to drugs. But I was losing it anyway. The worst episode was probably the time I was very nearly caught. The guy had a very up-market security system, and he managed to trigger the panic function just as I was introducing the probe of a meat thermometer to the left hemisphere of his brain, via his aural canal. It was the same model of thermometer I have in my kitchen, actually, and the feeling of resistance when inserting it was remarkably familiar. Thankfully, I saw the alarm panel illuminate, so I knew what was happening despite there being no audible alert. I left quickly. A little too quickly. I hid nearby for thirteen hours, give or take. And then when the crime scene had been sealed and left under guard, I managed to sneak back in, because I absolutely had to straighten the ornament I’d accidentally knocked out of alignment on a shelf when fleeing earlier. It was a golf trophy, as it turns out. I hadn’t left any prints, hairs, fibres, or DNA on it, and I knew that. I just physically couldn’t leave the area until I’d fixed it. When they brought me in for questioning, it was for an unrelated and admittedly less polished hit, and their evidence was virtually non-existent. They contacted me under one of my assumed names, for one thing, and I could tell immediately that I wasn’t even a person of interest yet. They’d got incredibly lucky, but they had no idea. I had my alibi all queued up, but I didn’t even have to use it. By that point, I was wearing cotton gloves all the time, and I would actually shudder whenever anyone extended their arm to shake hands with me. I have to rhythmically tap my thumbs against each of the other fingers on my respective hands, in one direction and then the other, constantly. I mutter the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 3, 2, 1 under my breath as I do it. I find it calming. Or not quite calming, but rather… it makes my thoughts tolerable. I also tend to rock back and forth a little, and I have to nod my head in time with each word when I speak, and blink too. Occasionally, to my infinite fascination, I find that I’m crying without being aware of it. I heard the two detectives talking while the uniformed officer escorted me out after they thanked me and told me I was free to go. That poor bastard could never have done it, one of them said. It’s amazing he even manages to leave his own home. Let them think what they like; that suits me just fine. My illness is debilitating, yes, but you have to maintain the right mindset. To me, it’s just another part of the puzzle to overcome. And it hasn’t stopped me yet.