With a little care and some tech skills, I was able to build a successful business through the Internet. With what all we know about the deepest pits of the web, it shouldn’t be surprising to you that I was able to operate mostly undetected. I’m sure I pinged on a few radars, but apparently none important enough to warrant further investigation.

My website was simple. Just a black page with a survey. There were only two fields. One was for an email address. The other was labeled as a password. In actuality, it was for entering a passcode. If you had the correct code, then your email address would be sent to mine and I could contact you at my leisure.

How could people get this code? Whispers in the darker corners of the web. The places people don’t like to look unless they need something very, very badly. I was one of those things that people needed.

Badly.

The code changed every day, of course. And I covered my tracks well. I didn’t take every case that came to me. In fact, I took very few. Just as they needed something, I did as well. They needed an extermination, the removal of a problem of a particularly cancerous nature.

I needed evil.

They would send me the target and any information they had on them. They didn’t get to dictate how the job was done, or when. I know many of them would have liked for their targets to suffer. I was not interested in suffering. I was only interested in the extermination. I would conduct research into them and decide if they fit the bill. If they were a true manifestation of evil.

People did not come to me lightly. It was well-known that I had a special policy. That is, I would conduct research into the person making the request as well as the target. And I would exterminate evil as I saw fit.

I do not pretend that what I did was right. I was not interested in being right. I was interested in surgery, which our society desperately needs.

I just became the scalpel.

There are many different kinds of evil. The one that I sought to destroy was human evil.

It is an evil that is prideful, lustful, wrathful, and a million other pieces of shattered glass that human nature is prone to. It is self-centered. There is no empathy, but there is joy. A great delight in what is done.

This is the evil that killed my mother.

Every kill was the same.

Guns, to me, were not possible, because they could be traced. Because they created a dreadful mess. Because they were sacred.

My mother, after all, had killed herself with one.

Poison was too slow, too obvious. There would be no way to get rid of the body. Besides, poison depends on trust, and that is something I am incapable of on either side of the equation.

I settled on piano wire.

It’s thin and sharp, a knife’s edge in a neat coil. It suffocates and it cuts. There is blood, but there is no gore. There is pain, but it is fragile and transient. It is not an easy death, but it is not an overly slow one, either.

It was sufficient.

My house, if you could get past the police tape to look at it now, is a mess of piano wire. It is beautiful, in its own way.

Nine deaths. Two middle-aged Caucasian males; one young adult, female Caucasian; two children, one Hispanic and one Native American; three elderly women of Asian descent; one elderly man, African American.

Race, age, and gender make little difference in surgery.

Two child-rapists; three budding serial killers with an abundance of tortured animals to their names; two child-beaters; two that committed hate crimes of a particularly grisly nature.

Evil exterminated.

As I completed my work, I took care not to ask the mirror any more questions. On my mother’s vanity it sat, waiting for me to return to its wisdom. For the moment, there was no need.

Ten deaths. One mistake.

She was beautiful, with gold-spun hair and a snort at the end of her laugh. She had long chipped fingernails and milky green eyes. A child molester, and her eight-year-old brother was her victim.

But, this time, my research was not impeccable. There were oversights. I didn’t see the seams in the fabrication, the undercurrent of hate in the lies. Once I’d completed my work, the man who had requested my help disappeared. That was when I understood my mistake.

That night, I returned to my mother’s mirror.

I sat in front of it, brushing the blood out of my hair with her long-toothed comb. I waited patiently for my answers.

What do you think I saw?

There is human evil, this much is easy enough to see. But it is not the only manifestation of evil in the world.

There is another sort, one of a darker nature. It lacks the self-awareness of human evil, the need to fulfill one’s own desires and bolster one’s pride. There is no remorse in this evil, but neither is there joy. There simply is a darkness that takes indiscriminately.

I sought to exterminate human evil. In order to do so, I had to become something more.

This darker evil, this is what I became. I thought I was just, but I was not. I thought I was society’s tool, but I was not. I merely sacrificed my humanity to become this darkness.

It was written on my face as I gazed into that mirror one last time. There was nothing human about my visage. There was no love, compassion, hate, fear, desperation. There was only that deep and abiding force to which I had given myself.

So I began the writing of this confession.

So I turned myself in.

I expect that I will die for my crimes.

Perhaps this is true justice. I am, after all, another form of evil. Though this evil is purer and cleaner than what I had destroyed, it is evil nonetheless.

My case is a mystery to investigators. There is no typical victim, but there is a typical method to their deaths. There is no passion, no fetish. I kept no trophies. There was nothing smug about my confession. Everything was too simple.

Evil is like that, didn’t you know? Simple.

I have seen many psychologists. They want me to be crazy, I suppose. But the definitions of “sanity” and “insanity” don’t apply to something like me.

So, let me leave you as I arrived with this message: no, I don’t regret what I did. What I became. It was something preordained, I think, in the way the stars shed life into the earth, in the way the old devour the young, in the way innocent blood feeds humanity. So I can have no regrets. Do you see?

I hope I can find a way to post this. To tell the world this story. It will change nothing. It will impact no one. But it will become an inextricable part of reality.

This is what reality deserves.