They call it “The Convenience Room”, even though it isn’t always in a particular room or spot. It travels from place to place, setting up in an area for sometimes a single night and other times an entire month before moving on. In some ways, it is like a traveling circus or fair, though it doesn’t offer the multitude of sights and sounds those places tend to provide. In fact, it only offers one thing.
The convenience of another’s death.
When the Room comes to a place, be it a city or a larger, more rural area, it shifts from spot to spot every night. That’s one of the keys to how it has worked for so long, you see. There is so little connecting one place to the next, one murder to the next, that it becomes almost impossible for a pattern to be developed, much less relied upon. No one investigates the Room because there is so little to investigate. And if one was to begin…well, who’s to say their death wouldn’t become convenient sooner rather than later?
It works like this.
When the Room has come to town, a series of symbols will be marked in either paint or chalk at various points around the city. The logic behind the location of where the symbols are left is up for debate, but some loose rules seem to have developed over the years. First, there will be one symbol left within 1000 yards of one house of worship of every religion in the area. It may be on a telephone pole, on a street, or inside an electrical box, but it will be there somewhere. Second, there will always be a symbol near one of the last murders that occurred in the area prior to the Room’s arrival.
That’s the Room’s calling card, you see. The way it announces it is on its way. A person is killed, often in a way that generally looks accidental, but amid whatever other injuries might have occurred, the last two fingers of their left hand will be broken. A small thing, and something that would never get reported widely. But for those awaiting the Room’s arrival, it is an easy enough thing to watch out for and learn about if one knows the right people.
And then the hunt for the symbols begins. People begin casually searching near the crime scene, or if they worry about drawing undue attention there, close to various churches, mosques, and synagogues in the area. The symbols are found and decoded, giving specific GPS coordinates and a time frame. As I said, the location will change day to day, so new symbols must be found every day as well. The time of day changes also, but the duration of the window never does. It is always ninety minutes.
That is the window of time you have to mark someone for death.
Once you know the place and time frame, all that is left is to go there at that time with the person you want erased from the world. You would think this would be the hardest part, as you have to come up with a convincing but innocent-sounding reason for someone you want dead to travel with you or meet you at some obscure spot. The funny thing is, so often the people we want dead are the ones we are closest to, and it usually isn’t hard to get them to show up at all.
Besides, the locations are never sinister. You aren’t carrying them to an abandoned warehouse or a midnight graveyard. The places are all very normal.
A restaurant. A hallway in a college building. The changing area of a department store. Most of the places are well-lit, well-populated and wholly unremarkable. That’s what makes it work so well.
Because for 99% of the people there, they are just living their lives: eating, going to a class, trying on clothes. For the other 1%...well, they are there as either victor or victim, or perhaps both. The third party present, unseen but ever watchful, are the servants of the Room. Their role is critical, as they must watch for the Signs.
The Signs are the other key information encoded in the symbols telling the where and the when of the Room on a given day. The Sign of the Victor is the signal given by the person marking someone in the Room for death--it might be touching your throat three times within a minute or checking your phone twice within two minutes while yawning both times. Once the Sign of the Victor is completed, the “victor” will have thirty seconds in which to start the Sign of the Victim. The Sign of the Victim is what marks a specific person for death. It might be rubbing someone’s back counterclockwise for three rotations or touching someone’s arm while your other hand is in your pocket.
The Signs are always natural and common, and they are different for every symbol one might find--even different symbols for the same day. This means that on any given day there are several different Signs of the Victor and Victim that will work. But they only work if paired with the other Sign from the same symbol, and they are only taken as marking someone if done exactly right at exactly the right time and place. If done correctly, then you’re finished. The person you marked will die.
Eventually. That’s another trick of the whole thing. You aren’t marking them to die right then or even that day or week. That would obviously call too much attention to the Room. Instead, some time within the following two or three months, the person will be in a terrible car accident. Or their house will have a gas leak. Or they will get shot in a robbery gone wrong. You’ll never know how or when they will die until it has already happened.
And it always happens. I’ve heard stories of people who had second-thoughts and tried to warn the intended victim. The victim still dies, and usually the other person does as well. The few times someone has tried to go to the authorities about it…same result and nothing is ever investigated.
That is the thing you have to understand about the Convenience Room. No one knows who runs it or why. Not really. There are rumors, of course. Always rumors. You hear it was created by a rich madman that enjoys it as some kind of macabre game. There are stories about some kind of serial killer religion called “The Dark Path” that uses the Convenience Room as a kind of church. I don’t know if any of it is true, and I don’t know that any of it matters.
Because at the end of the day, the Convenience Room is a kind of machine. You turn certain levers and knobs, such as laughing while rubbing your nose followed by picking something off your husband’s shirt, and the gears start turning. And when they have stopped, your husband is dead.
And there is no off switch. You aren’t paying an assassin, you aren’t having secret meetings with a hitman. You aren’t paying any money and the killer or killers aren’t doing it because you want it done, but because they want to do it. All you are doing is pointing them in a particular direction, and once you do, you couldn’t stop them if you tried.
That thought eased my guilt when I plucked a hair from Ronald’s jacket. It was one of his…he was going balder these days…but I still pretended it was a gossamer strand from that young whore he had been seeing. I wasn’t killing him because he cheated…not really. But looking at myself as the jilted wife did make the whole thing a bit more palatable. Easier on the stomach than just admitting that over the last fifteen years I had grown to fucking hate him.
Still, I felt a sharp stab of regret as soon as I had completed the Sign of the Victim. Couldn’t I just divorce him? I would get less money and more hassle, but I wouldn’t have this stain on my soul. And was he really that bad?
I watched him for a moment. A short, dumpy man reading something on his phone rather than looking at any of the paintings in the gallery. Rather than sparing a glance for me. All the while scratching at his growing bald spot, no doubt sending disgusting flakes of his dry, crusty skin fluttering over the floor the same way he spreads them over my house. The same way he has spread his mediocrity over my entire life for nearly two decades, tainting everything I have.
No, fuck him, he deserves it. It’s no different than in countries where the sentence for stealing is death. Ronald was nothing if not a thief of my…
That’s when I realized he was looking at me. More than that, he was reaching out and rubbing my cheek in two short strokes. He never did that. What was he…
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