Serial killers are fascinating, there’s no way around it. Even if you’re the type of person who hates gore, crime, and hearing about murder, you will always perk up if a serial killer is mentioned on TV. You’re curious, is why. Somewhere in your head you want to know how a person that seems so normal on the outside can be so sick and twisted in their own head. The thing about serial killers is that they don’t follow our societal rules. They’ve made up their own code, and they follow it carefully, but they completely disregard the way the rest of us live life. It’s easy for them to do this though, because many serial killers are psychopaths, and not in the same way you might claim your ex girlfriend is, but in the true sense of the term. Psychopaths are by definition people who lack empathy and guilt. They are self absorbed, and think only of their own gain or gratification. They are antisocial, act on impulses and will make the same mistakes over and over again despite negative consequences.

bloody knife

With no morals to guide them, and only their own impulses to drive them it’s unsettling (yet oddly understandable) what happens next. They are still different people however, and are driven by different things. Some suffer from hallucinations, breaks with reality and the like. These are the type that generally claim God or some nearby animal instructed them to kill for a greater cause. Some have it in their head that certain types of people are lower than insects and should not exist. They then take it upon themselves to get rid of them. Some do it because holding power over their victims lives makes them feel good. Others want to gain the material possessions or money of their victims. And most often these serial killers either gain sexual pleasure from killing, or are looking for the thrill of getting away with it.

In some way or another, a lot of these things motivate us as well. You might climb up the corporate ladder because you want to be the one giving the orders and not taking them, or you might buy a fancy car or a push up bra to attract the opposite sex. The difference is, we follow the rules set in place for us by our society and court system. We know the difference between what is morally right, and what is wrong. And of course….. we don’t kill.

May we reconvene under the blood red moon,
-Black Widow

In all time periods there are specific jobs that must be fulfilled, and there are upper and lower class people who find different work in different places. Getting inspiration for your Halloween costume from modern day jobs might not be the best way to impress the crowd at a party or function, but change the time period and voilà, instant wow-factor.

Medieval Lady

If you chose to dress from the medieval era there would be a multitude of options available for your to choose from (many of which can be more easily/cheaply purchased than made). You could be a duke or a king and wear huge gaudy jewelry to compliment your costume, possibly even taking along a turkey drumstick as a prop. Of course whether it’s real or not would be up to you and how much you really wanted to be able to use that hand, because it’s going to be covered in food-grease for at least part of the party. You could be a knight, strong and true to your lord and country with armor of plastic, paper mache, or cardboard boxes. On the flip side, you could be a peasant man/boy, or an apprentice or page. Ladies could easily be a queen, princess, lady, or otherwise with long flowing gowns and veiled hats. Or you could choose to be a maid, bar ‘wench’, farm girl or lady in waiting.

If it didn’t suit you to be just a random person from the medieval era there are the tales of King Arthur’s court to sift through and pick and choose specific persons from, as well as more modern and more humorous versions such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail. There are plenty of characters to choose from that would make for good laughs, such as the knights who say ‘Ni!’, the black knight who continued to fight despite losing nearly all of his limbs, or the lads who banged the coconut halves together to feign horse galloping noises.

The smell of smoke drifts into your bedroom and you wake up coughing. After glancing at your digital alarm clock and thinking groggily for a few moments that ‘it’s not even daylight out yet’, you realize it wasn’t the alarm that woke you. You smell the smoke and walk out towards the living room of your apartment but everything seems normal enough. You can smell it though, something is on fire somewhere and the smoke is spreading quickly. You slip on some shoes, grab your wallet and cellular phone and head out into the hallway. The emergency exit is around the corner, but curiosity gets the better of you and you follow your nose instead. You head in the other direction and open the door to the stairwell on the other side of the hall.

angel

Where the stairs turn, you can see fire. It’s directly above your floor but nobody seems to be awake, or leaving. The sprinkler system hasn’t turned on either. You quickly close the door and run back down the hall. Were you really just that heavy of a sleeper that you didn’t notice everyone else leaving? Or was there no alarm, no warning? Was everyone still in their apartments sleeping?

You bang on your neighbor’s door and she opens it, groggily staring up at you and wondering why you’ve woken her. The building is on fire, you explain hurriedly, you tell her she has to get out. It seems that it wasn’t just you, it was the entire floor. As she runs back inside to grab her dog, you rub back down the hall. Starting at the apartments closest to the stairwell, you scream and knock on each door until the person comes out, or you’re convinced that nobody is home. The air gets thick around you, and you can see the flames curling through the ceiling now, but you make sure to get everyone in your hall out of the building. As you head down the stairs of the emergency exit though, you feel lightheaded and unstable. You struggle to get out of the building but your limbs give way to fatigue. There isn’t enough oxygen in your blood, and you think that maybe this was the last thing you were meant to do before you die. Your eyelids grow heavy and you loose consciousness.

To your surprise though, you wake up in an ambulance not even a half-hour later. You ask a paramedic what happened and he explains that someone had dragged you out of the building and disappeared soon after. You ask if it was a firefighter, and the man tells you that this person was dressed casually.

The paramedic smiles at you and says “Maybe you’ve got a guardian angel.”

May we reconvene under the blood red moon,
-Black Widow