Free The Strangler's Honeymoon by Håkan Nesser

projectors by the roots and put an end to everything once and for all, and fall down into darkness and silence and eternal merciful rest and forgetfulness . . . These images.
    Benjamin Kerran.
    Standing there in the bathroom, watching her.
    Just standing there, while she squatted on the lavatory seat, emptying her bladder, then trying to press out a few more drops while frenetically trying to work out a plan in her head. Frustratedly and desperately she rejected all possibilities even before they came to the surface of her flickering consciousness. He dug his hand down inside his trousers, contemplating her with glazed-over eyes and an increasingly warped smile, then suddenly he whipped his penis out of his flies, in a sort of perverted triumph, and ordered her to give him head while she was still sitting on the lavatory. That gave him extra stimulus, he said. No, he didn’t order her: Benjamin Kerran didn’t order her to do it, the circumstances didn’t need that. This was different. Instead he used the same remarkable blend of entreaty and threat as before, that was sufficient. ‘You wouldn’t want your mother to find out about us, would you?’ he said. ‘Just one more time. It’ll be easy . . . Don’t you think we should grant ourselves an enjoyable finish, especially as it started so well?’
    And she did what he wanted. Was almost sick as he thrust his penis a long way into her throat, but she was even closer to being sick when she thought of the possibility of biting off his glans penis. Just bite him as hard as she could – would that save her? she wondered. Is that enough to kill a man, biting off his cock? Would one strong bite be enough?
    She didn’t know, and didn’t do it anyway. It wasn’t necessary, as at that very moment she caught sight of a pair of scissors lying on a shelf diagonally behind his back: no more planning was necessary, none at all. All that was needed was to remain cool and calculating and wait for the right moment. That was all.
    And in the insistent cinema of her memory she watches herself flush the lavatory and stand up. Sees herself both from the outside and the inside – these pictures that are three days old, but nevertheless seem to her to be older than life itself . . . She forces him out of her mouth but grasps his penis in her hand instead and tosses him off, just as he has taught her to do during the short and bewitched time they have known each other, and slowly manoeuvres herself into a position behind his back. She holds his stiff cock in her left hand, stretches round from behind his back, meets his green eyes in the bathroom mirror, and out of his line of vision reaches out with her right hand for the scissors, takes hold of them silently and then stabs them into his stomach with one violent thrust. Without a thought in her head.
    Sees his face reflected in the mirror, sees it dilating and expressing first genuine surprise for a fraction of a second. The pain. Then nothing.
    She feels his virility deflating in her hand, just as quickly as the air gushing out of a balloon.
    Sees – and feels – him collapse without a sound, no more than a slight hiss like the flow of air from the one of those balloons, albeit a bigger one. He falls like a felled ox, like a shot beast, onto the blue-green clinker floor with its small goose pimples and false fossils and genuine heating coils, and sticking out just over his right hip are the shiny handle loops of the scissors, like a magic, mythological symbol. The blades have penetrated him as far as they could go, ten centimetres at least, and even as she stands there staring at the body and at her own face in the mirror, she wonders if he is dead. Already dead? Is it so easy? Doesn’t it take any longer than that? Is that all that’s involved?
    And she sees – in the unremitting cinema of her memory – how she leaves the bathroom, rushes out of the flat. How she slams the door behind her with a loud bang that echoes in the