jamieproctor.ca

Dave was always a tidy guy.  Everything in its place, and a place for everything, that was how he worked.  Which made the way he killed himself really weird.  Blood everywhere, on everything.  He would’ve been livid.
What I should’ve done next was call the cops.  Then I could’ve figured out what the hell he was looking at – “major breakthrough!” and all.
And I did just that.  Sort of.  But I decided to look through what he was reading after the 911 call.  You know, inform the police, right?  Be helpful.  Besides, it was clearly a suicide – how many people were murdered by holding up a butter knife and stabbing themselves in the neck? – so no chance they’d miss fingerprints from a killer if he didn’t exist.  This way I could tell them exactly what my roomie had been going over when he departed this vale of tears mortal coil etcetera etcetera etcetera.
Besides, I was curious.  He’d been obsessing over this project for months.  Research, research, research, and not a drop of information as to what.  No hints, if, ands, or buts, just slammed doors and covered papers and “you’ll see it when it’s ready”s.  A guy can be excused for a little curiosity under those circumstances, right?
So I reached gingerly around his neck and yanked away the papers he’d been looking at.  Straight away, I knew this was a long way from a thesis yet.  Maybe he’d realized it never would be and had done himself in?  Didn’t sound right.
Page one was a bunch of scribbled and illegible notes as to the tone and content of an introduction.  None of it made any sense.
Page two was where it started to get clearer, if not more interesting.  Senseless and weird, but interesting.  A long-winded and badly-written treatise on the superstitions and beliefs of some demi-obscure northern European peoples during the dark ages.  Tedious and not fully edited, but a decent leadin to page three, which was a hodge-podge of facts and myths about an axe some king used for a while.  A very short while.  On the very first battle he used it in, he’d gone mad, decapitated twenty men, eight of which had been enemies, and then been stabbed to death over forty exhausting minutes.  The axe was taken by the king opposing him, who successfully managed to top his score four battles later, when he murdered his entire command staff during a strategic session.
Huh.
Page four.  The axe claimed two more important people before it was deemed cursed – a very right and proper superstition, I’d say – and given to a blacksmith to be melted down and discarded.  Good quality metal, though, as one of Dave’s notes eagerly attested, so the last instruction, he hypothesized, had been ignored.  So the big, fancy suit of plate armour that came out of the blacksmith’s shop a few months later might’ve contained a little crazy-axe.  Who’d know?  Well, no one did, although the man in the armour was probably puzzled some weeks later when it shattered spectacularly during a practice bout, grievously wounding him and sending a jagged piece of metal into his sparring partner’s eye.  Seeing that the deceased man was his brother-in-law and a quite important man in his own right, this led to a very jolly series of events involving a whole bunch more dead nobility.  The armour was deemed unsound and smelted down.  But it was such a waste of good metal, so….
I skimmed ahead.  More reforgings, more gruesome deaths.  A rapier that left an unsettling streak of mutual-mortality duels before someone got skittish and hocked it.  A zweihander – that one had an impressive kill count indeed before its wielder went down, probably because he was an armed and armoured lord overseeing a peasant battalion.
Then things got really strange.  Four pages with no more examples, just ramblings, theorizing, and speculation on the reliability of the evidence.  Followed by assurances of more proof.
I glanced uneasily at Dave’s body.  This wasn’t the sort of thing that healthy people did, and what I was reading sounded like one of those really bad sci-fi movies made with 85% CG and 15% story, but there were an awful lot of sources marked down here.  Some of the names I’d even heard of, big ones.  But squirreled away in odd notes, margins, other things.  Nothing obvious.
Past the semi-delusional justifications, there was more.  A long drought, and then a pistol that exploded in someone’s hand when fired.  A shame to waste something so expensive, so it was taken back, repaired, and exploded during the test shot the smith made in front of the customer to demonstrate its renewed soundness, killing both of them with bits of hurtling metal and wood.
Firearms were the trend for a while, mostly small pistols, occasionally rifles, but almost always finely-made.  Officer’s stuff.  Whatever Dave was tracking never seemed to end up in the hands of grunts, people whose property wouldn’t be important enough to reuse later, or might be lost unclaimed on a battlefield.  No one who’d break the chain of hand-me-downs for long.  There was a skewing from the military trend for a short period – the busiest guillotine in Paris for a year and a month, a razor with an uncanny thirst for the throats of gentlemen.
More digressions.  I glanced at Dave again as I skimmed over the research.  Still no hint as to why he’d done it.  Maybe the last page would have a cited source that made the entire thing make no sense whatsoever and he’d offed himself in the shame of wasting almost a year on it.
A few rifles used by crack snipers, ones that never died on the field but tended to have unfortunate accidents back on shore leave, where their weapons would be claimed by others easily and quickly.  The prototype for the first gatling gun was on its menu.  There was a fun surprise.  One of Custer’s pistols at Little Big Horn.  A World War I-era dreadnought, which fired four times in its career.  The first three shots sank one enemy ship each.  Then they brought it back, tooled it up for repairs, fired a practice volley, and its magazine blew.  All hands went down less than a few hundred feet from shore, and the ship was scrapped.
There was a tank in Germany during the last, nasty fights near Berlin.  Massacred four or five separate squads at once from cover, then took out a bunch of its own soldiers sheltering near it when it blew.  Dave had scrawled a small note here questioning whether the tank’s crew’s bodies had been found.  Or if they’d existed.
And after that, it got hazy.  There was a train somewhere in France that went off the rails, but most of the rest were just examples of AK-47s and such that got swapped around and had misfirings.  Very bland, and some of them were definitely stretches.  I started to realize why Dave might have decided this was a waste of time…except, he’d said he had a breakthrough.
Then I hit the last page, which commented on a story from last year about a state official’s car blowing its engine and swerving off a bridge (no survivors, naturally), and found a little note about its remains being sold to Home Steel.  The rest was all blood spatter from Dave, who’d really made a mess of his jugular.  Awful stuff.
I pulled out my Blackberry – noting as I did that Dave had done the same thing, somewhat worryingly, although his was coated in a thin layer of his bodily fluids – and checked.  Home Steel produced stainless-steel household items, including a full line of silverware.
My head very slowly moved upwards to examine Dave again.  The knife still had butter on it.  It looked entirely innocent.
I turned off my Blackberry, put it in my pocket, reached for Dave’s notes, decided against it, and ran like bejeezus; sprinting through the kitchen, vaulting the living room couch, and slamming the front door behind me with enough force to set off the small, stupid dog of the lady down the hall.  Something very small smacked into the wood against my back, making the whole frame quiver.
I waited for my pulse to drop a little, and heard nothing further.
“A garbage dump,” I said aloud.  “One of the really old-style bad ones.  One of the ones where they aren’t even ever going to try to recycle anything, because it’s probably been breeding down there and building cities.”  It was either that or the Marianas Trench, and I doubted I could get there on a student’s cash supply, let alone quickly enough for it not to find a way to shank me.
Ah, there were the cops.  I hoped I could get them to read the papers before they confiscated the knife as evidence.  Things could get messy otherwise.

“Research Paper,” copyright 2010, Jamie Proctor.