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My name is Philip Rushton. I am 32 years old. Tall. Blond. Handsome. A regular gym goer. I run my own successful sandwich shop catering to the local office district and for the last eight years I have enjoyed killing people.

You might be wondering how I have managed to get away with killing people, on average one a month, for the last eight years. The answer to that is simple. I go in over the phones.

I first had the idea when a local priest was pressing me to “take calls of mercy.” I told him it wasn’t for me. It sounded like the kind of work that I wouldn’t be well suited to. But he kept pushing and in the end, with encouragement from my wife, I gave in.

I didn’t feel an ounce of sorrow for the people calling in. Not a single droplet. I listened to them whining and sobbing; pathetic little clumps of flesh wasting good clean air for the rest of us. I could not take it any more. I was at the end of my tether, about to walk out.
One more call, I told myself.

I recognized the voice as soon as the call came through. I sat bolt upright and adjusted the headphones. It was definitely him. It’s not a voice you could mistake. For five years I sat in his classroom, struggling to come to terms with algorithms. He liked to see me struggle. He pulled at my feelings of inferiority and molded them into a thing for his own amusement. But here he was. This was my curriculum.

“My wife… sob sob sob… she’s… sob sob… gone. We were together for thirty-five years…”

Oh yes. The waters flowed in my mouth. My veins tingled as I realized that there could be more to 1 800 SAMARITAN than the training had suggested. I pulled the microphone nearer to my mouth – took a glance around at the other Samaritans to make sure they were all engaged in calls and not listening to me – and cut him off in mid whine.

“Boo fucking hoo!” I whispered.

He acted as if he hadn’t heard it. It had to have been a figment of his depression, a Samaritan would never say a thing like that.

“Boo fucking hoo,” I hissed again. “The old cunt is dead!”

“What? You… sob... sob… What…?”

“Mr. Heathcoat, really, you’re better off without the old whore. She was sucking half the cocks in town. Right up until, … but then you knew that, right Mr. Heathcoat? We all left money on the bedside cabinet. We all assumed she was cutting you in on it. That’s fucked up, that she didn’t give you your share.”

I could hear him faltering, struggling for air. A heart attack surely couldn’t be far away.

“I was round at your place most weeks. The old scroat couldn’t get her false teeth out quick enough. Are you sure you didn’t know? It’s ironic when you think about it. I mean, a third of the male population in town were greasing your wife’s gums on a weekly basis and yet, I bet she hadn’t given you a good nosh in… y-e-a-r-s.”

The headline in the local newspaper read: “Local Math Teacher Dies of a Broken Heart!”

It was a heart attack though. He was found on the living room floor with the phone still in his hand.

Of course, I realized then the power I held as a Samaritan. I didn’t go lusting after death straight away. I took time to ponder: what should I do with this poisoned tongue of mine? Who should I point it at? But in the end I realized that there was no fair system. There was no way to dress it up. No moral justification to apply to what I was going to do. For a while I tried to convince myself that I would be ridding the planet of the pitiable and the pathetic, but at the end of the day I just had to be honest: it would be killing, plain and simple.

I tried, and still do try, to be disciplined. I indulge myself once a month, a treat for being a good boy. My wife noticed a certain change in me when this first started. She claims that once a month I morph into some kind of sexual deity. I seem to acquire a Greek stamina and an attention to detail normally only recognized in map surveyors.

Over time I perfected my modus operandi. To begin with I would have to scan the local papers to find out if my deed had been done. Whenever I managed to get a name I would look up the address. I would jump in my car and race to the victims houses. I would park up a hundred meters away, hoping for the arrival of an ambulance. Sometimes I would pack a picnic and stake the place out for days. But then, by accident, my goal was shifted. It came quite without warning.

“But why? Why? Why? Why?” the woman was screaming at me down the phone. “It’s not like I’m a whore. Why me? Why? I just want to die. I’m gonna fucking die anyway! I just needed a fix, one more fix, one more fucking needle!”

I was considering hanging up. I mean really, where was the challenge in that?

“But I know that’s not the way,” she said as I reached out to cut her off.

She sounded really calm all of a sudden.

“Can you believe I even bought a gun today? But I can get a refund. I’m not taking the coward’s way out. This is my life and I will deal with it.”

Now she had my interest.

“You guys are great,” she said while blowing into a tissue. “I mean you sit there and you listen to all these problems and you don’t judge. You just let people spill their guts and…”

I just had to interrupted.

“I had a friend with HIV once,” I told her. “They told her that medication would help to keep things stable, but they lied of course. It’s all a big experiment. In no time at all she was covered in lesions – nothing but rotting skin and bone. The surprising thing for me was the family. They all cut contact and completely disowned her for the scum she was. She became so vile in appearance that…”

I spoke for a good thirty minutes. She didn’t interrupt me once, but I could hear her there on the phone, breathing, sighing, sobbing and then at last…

Bang! A second and a half later I heard the thud of her body hitting the floor.

From that day to this, a killing does not count unless I can get my victims to do it while I am there on the phone. I even consider it a failure if they hang up and don’t kill themselves until the next day. I take a minus on my tally if ever that happens now.

I guess my trophy killing was the teenage girl I convinced to slit her wrists while we were talking. I stayed on the line talking to her while her blood drained out of her. I wasn’t saying anything important. Just filling her in on how the kids were doing at school, the wife’s new car, Lucy’s dead goldfish. Conventional stuff.

Then there was another one where a couple of seconds after the bang and the thud-thud of the falling body, the smash of something ceramic, I heard a scream. It was the mother who ran in when she heard the gun shot, to find her son sprawled out on his bedroom floor and me on the phone.

“Who are you?” she whispered, half sobbed into the phone.

“You have no idea what you did to that boy do you?” I asked excited at the prospect of a double whammy.

“Who are you?” She sobbed again.

“Do you consider yourself a mother? Look at your son; you see his blood, dripping, are his brains all over the wall? In fact, does he even have a head? That headless bloody thing, that bloddy pulp, is your son, ma’am. He killed himself, or at least so he told me, because of you! The brains on the wall are there… they’re fruits of your mothering.”

Unfortunately, she didn’t kill herself until three months after the funeral. And I for one take no joy in that.

I took two sisters in one phone call once, but that doesn’t carry the weight of a mother and her son. I took a sixteen-year-old girl and her dad once. She called in to tell me about how her father was abusing her. She was a cheap target I admit, but I had a cold at the time and wasn’t at full strength. She is my youngest so far. It didn’t take much. I told her that she was a cheap little whore and that daddy was giving her exactly what she deserved. She swallowed fifty sleeping pills. I waited on the phone while she went to fetch a glass of water. The father was an easier target still. He called up a week later confessing to the whole shebang, the abuse and the suicide of his daughter. I told him that I had spoken to her. I even shared with him a few choice details that only he would know. I mentioned that we had recorded her story and had passed it on to the police. I told him the police were preparing for arrest.

He used a revolver to the gut.

But this was over two phone calls and three days. It hardly makes up for my mother and son fumble.

But that’s enough about me. I’ve taken up enough of your time. I just needed to get this off my chest. Come on stop snivelling. Pull yourself together! And you call yourself a Samaritan.

Come along now.

What advice do you have for me?


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Alan Emmins is the author of Mop Men (Corvo Books, September 2004), "A cautionary tale shot through with puss..." the Independent (UK)

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