Short story: Accommodating Mr Landown
In which a terrible person is murdered. Also, happy Pride month!
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Happy Pride month everyone! Hope you enjoy this short murderous horror…
Accommodating Mr Landown
It takes preparation to get away with killing.
Mr Landown would smack the bum of any woman walking past him in the village café. He posted abysmal things on the Facebook group just because he saw two guys holding holding hands by the green. I won’t repeat the way he raved in the pub when the first black family moved into the village. And I’m no a believer, but I’d never spit at people as they leave a church, but of course Mr Landown did. He never wore a facemask during the lockdowns and would pointedly cough towards anyone he met outside. His estate included public footpaths, and he bricked across the access points — he wasn’t going to share his views with anyone.
Mr Landown was rich but made everyone else poorer. He took satisfaction in scraping away joy from the world and hording it in his miserable skull.
We tried to hold up a mirror to his words and deeds. Again and again, politely or directly, we’d explain.
“You can’t say anything anymore,” he’d say while never shutting up.
To put is another way, he was an oozing wound, leaking stinking pus into the world. He was the kind of person who drives others to their graves, always by deniable increments of stress and misery. It’s only fair that I planned to return the favour.
At the newsagent, I casually mentioned I’d spotted, over Mr Landown’s shoulder, that he’d been browsing around-the-world cruise websites on his phone. Waiting in the queue in the supermarket, I shared seeing Mr Landown receiving a delivery of posh-looking luggage.
Within a couple of days, I heard rumours back I’d not started, all saying Mr Landown was leaving the village, going on a voyage to Bali, or Hawaii, or around the Arctic circle. By the end of the week, toasts were made in honour of his upcoming departure, and wishing for its swift arrival.
The short summer nights meant I had to stay up late to sneak massive boards onto his estate, slowly dragging them over the back wall and leaving them concealed in the woodland beside his house. Mr Landown was not the kind of man to walk among trees — he owned them, that was enough — so would never find them. He would rather go to the pub and spread his bile in public than meander through serene leafy pathways.
And then I arranged for a Pride celebration at the pub.
His apoplectic response to rainbow flags and pink-tinted ale was enough that I thought it might finish him off there and then. His ruddy face almost exploded as invective spewed from him. Perhaps his fuming brain or overtaxed heart could have burst, but he would never spare anyone the effort.
Still, as I knew it would, the Pride event provided a distraction so I could steal his mobile phone. The village Facebook group was deprived of Mr Landown’s BLOCK CAPITAL outrage at our festivities.
That night, from the shadows of the trees, I watched the phoneless Mr Landown extinguish the last lights in his house.
Foam adhesives can really keep a board in place, surprisingly fast. One by one, I blocked his downstairs windows, each time feeling like I was building a dam holding back poison.
It took an hour, and Mr Landown must have been deep into his drunken stupor when I silently used his own ladder to mount boards across the upstairs windows and cut his landline.
The last step was the most dangerous: I had to break in through the front door. The wood splintered as my crowbar levered it open. The chain jangled inside as it wobbled open. I held my breath.
Wind stirred the trees.
A clock ticked deep in the darkness.
Nothing else.
The utility cupboard was by the door. I took all the fuses from the electricity meter. I turned off the house’s water and bent the head of the spigot with the crowbar so it couldn’t be turned on again.
Creeping back out, I placed the final board across his door, sealing him inside.
I sat on his front step and inhaled the scent of grasses and warm soil.
Eventually he woke. Thunderous banging reverberated from the boards on the windows upstairs. I strolled to the front garden and watched them vibrate. The boards held firm.
Clomping footsteps charged down the staircase inside.
His weight slammed against the panel over the front door. A scream of rage and pain told me he’d hurt himself. Each subsequent kicks and thud became weaker.
I settled on the front step again, listening as he bumped into furniture without any light to see in the darkness. He tried every board, and every time he made me more comfortable he couldn’t escape. Eventually it went silent inside. A while later, there was sobbing.
From the other side of the front door, I heard one howled word: “Why?”
My jaw dropped. Was he so oblivious to the hatred he smeared like shit across the life of everyone he’d met? If I could have shown him, somehow, would he have changed? Was that a plea for explanation — to be given a reason he would finally listen to?
But this isn’t A Christmas Carol. I’m not the ghost of Christmas anything. There’s no miracle for Mr Landown. Fuck him. He’d had a lifetime of chances to learn and grow and be kind and to not be a stain, drain, weight, noose, parasite, and fuming fungal infestation. He’d never tried to be better. I wasn’t going to give him another chance to take his miserable toll yet again, to prove his pattern is sewage to the bone. He didn’t want to change. He had a lifetime to change. I’d accommodated him for the last time. Fuck him fuck him fuck him.
Flecks of pink tinted the clouds. Blackbirds sang among the trees. An early squirrel bounded across the unkempt lawn.
I left.
Without water it would only take a few days for him to die, so, you see, I’m not a cruel person. There was no need to drag it out longer than necessary.
It took a week for the village whispers to begin.
“He’s taken that cruise.”
“Hope he gets seasick the whole way.”
“Here’s hoping for a shipwreck.”
Three weeks later, they discovered his boarded up house. With no suspicious circumstances, there was no reason to look inside: everyone knew he was planning to go away.
“Just like him to not tell anyone.”
“Who would he have told? No one cared.”
In smaller or larger ways, everyone was happier.
It takes preparation to kill without being caught, but it helps when the target is a raging arsehole.
As his corpse rots, we raise pints and toast his cruise.
—
The end
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That’s it for this week. Hope you enjoyed this dark one!
Next week I’ll be digging into the choices made while writing this story, so if you’re interested in the decisions that drive writing something like this — and in picking up ideas for your own writing — stay tuned!
Go be your wonderful selves (don’t murder people), spread kindness, and keep hope for the future.
Love to you all,
Mata