Chapter 1

Edinburgh

17^th September, 18:54

The icy edge of the blade licked the soft skin of her throat, craving the enticing taste of blood, her own trembling hand keeping its firm grip. Blinded by the dark room, she squeezed her eyes to focus her vision, as something leaked from them like never before. The burning water dried her lips, carving deep river lines on her pale cheeks. She dampened her fingertips, watched the liquid flow through, her teeth chattering.

“It has to stop. It all has to stop!”

She panted, short-breathed, foaming at the mouth. Every object around throbbed with eerie life, as if she had roused after a long coma. An invisible presence strangled her chest. Blood stained the bottom of her black trousers. Not hers. Not fresh.

She wasn’t wounded.

The withered marks sparked questions she had never thought to ask. She replayed the day in her mind, rummaging for a cause powerful enough to push her to the border between life and death, as the cold metal still bit her neck sharply.

A normal workday. The black plate on her dark blue office door flashed through her vision, five golden letters shining through the blur.

“Karen.”

It was merely a word that meant nothing but the label everyone called her. Was it just that, or did it mean something more? She whispered her name again and again until it lost all meaning… or gained a new one. She couldn’t tell which. Karen pictured her minimalistic office, her scentless and dust-free flat, the small, empty couch and armchair. The mechanical and predictable city, suddenly suffocating. Everything that had always been normal filled her with nausea, though she didn’t realise why; she just knew it was all completely wrong.

“Think, think!” Karen echoed, trying to stop the pounding in her chest as she crumbled on the warm carpet of her neat living room. All she wanted was to go back to her routine fast.

She ransacked her memory. The surprisingly plain lyophilised breakfast, the usual strolling to work with steady rhythm—her only way to stay healthy as she never exercised. The uneventful day at the newspaper office. Then, as she had always known from the beginning, she remembered.

She relived everything.

After her shift, Karen queued to get a hot drink to warm her up, stopping by the same sterile vending machine. The silence on the street screamed in her memory: nobody spoke, nobody moved. They simply queued, waiting for their orders quietly, exactly like her as she listened to each drop of water steam as it ran through the brewing machine. The vague eyes around her stared at the digital panel in front of them, and Karen realised her own eyes resembled the rest. Another number in the crowd, or so she believed.

Sipping away at her warm but flavourless caffeinated water that kept her hands warm in the chilled September weather, Karen headed back home, striding along immaculate streets. Not a scrap of junk clogged the pathways, the traffic disciplined like conscientious worker ants stalking each other. The entire city held its breath. Karen trotted down Leith Walk, turning into Pilrig Park, its emerald area surrounded by darkness, as the wind howled through the branches of the high trees thrashing in the gusts.

Raucous yelps rebounded in her eardrums, but Karen kept her pace steady, indifferent to everything else. The hoots grew to barks and squeals until a stray dog loped out of the thick bushes, clutching a piece of meat between its teeth. Two other long-legged dogs chased the first, snapping at its legs and cornering it with no escape. Karen had never witnessed a scuffle between stray dogs. The other dogs bit the first dog fiercely over and over. The sound of broken bones under teeth echoed in the night until it eventually dropped the rotten piece of meat. Limping and defenceless, it finally escaped, while the other two scurried away with their spoils of war. The injured dog hobbled towards Karen and sought shelter between her legs, bathing her trousers in warm blood.

Karen looked down at the animal, blankly meeting its fading brown eyes. The dog whined softly, almost murmuring. It settled its head on Karen’s brown boot with watery eyes, wiggling its tail, pleading her to save its life. She stood glacial, watching its breathing slow down, reduce. Until the very last exhale, as the tail stopped fluttering. Karen’s heartbeat didn’t spur, she didn’t blink. Her body was unyielding, like thick metal. She dragged some tissue from her purse and wiped her trousers as if cleaning a spill on the pavement. She wrapped the unsanitary paper with more tissue and tucked it back in her purse, ready to be disposed of. With a casual nudge of her foot, Karen pushed the dog’s lifeless body away, resuming her walk home. Her stomach rumbled.

Karen paraded in the quiet night and reached her flat, where she put her tasteless, nutritious pre-packed meal in the microwave. She sat on the couch, mechanically chewing as she watched the news on TV, until the fork suddenly slipped from her hand and clattered on the carpet. Karen bent to pick it up, brushing her red fringe aside—and froze. The dog’s blood, dark and sticky, clung to her trousers like a second skin.

The image of its wide, shining pupils flashed behind her own eyelids, its marred and broken body revived in her memory. Her chest constricted. An unfamiliar sensation spread through her, a powerful drubbing overloaded her brain. For the first time, she acknowledged the beating muscle in her chest, always silent but now awake, insistent.

Alive.

Why hadn’t she acted? Why did she just watch?

She had never pulsed like that for anything or anyone. Her thoughts burned through her temples as her entire life until that night replayed itself.

“What if… it had been me? How would I have… reacted? What if I’d asked for help and no one had answered? I could have saved it, but… I watched… I just watched it die!”

The crush of those thoughts repulsed her. A violent charge stormed through her abdomen as her eyes saw things they had never seen, truths hidden right under her nose. Everyone around her ignored each other, suffering in hibernation. Mere lives locked shut to everything but work and careers, the only things that mattered to them. Nothing made them feel how she felt now. Her stomach clenched. Her limbs trembled. She panted and coughed, alive like never before. Karen’s eyes darted around the room. She had nobody. Her flat had turned into a void. No one beside her, nobody to help her if she had needed it. She was one of the abandoned. The emptiness around nested inside of her and devoured everything, as her belly rumbled again, still hungry but not for food. Her life looked a complete failure, and no leather couch or two-bedroom flat would change that, no matter what her colleagues believed.

Thick darkness dominated her brain, draining the air out of her lungs. Karen collapsed on the floor, hitting her face against the warm carpet.

Her glued eyes reopened; her sense of time completely shattered. Karen struggled onto her knees, wild twitches hunting her body. Acrid sweat ran down her face, fouling her mouth—the first thing that ever had a flavour in her life. And she would never forget it. She tasted it again and again with the tip of her tongue, unable to decide whether she liked it.

She staggered to her feet only to tumble back down, crouching on the floor, clutching her head with rigid hands. Itching to tear the hair off her scalp. Karen screamed and cried as the flat walls seemed to shrink around her. She wobbled towards the kitchen, searching for something she couldn’t name. All she wanted was to end the roaring pain.

In a frantic rapture, she grabbed a shiny knife from the tidy counter. Tightened the grip around the handle, squeezed the frigid metal. She pointed its ridged end against her throat as the disarrayed memories of the earlier hours finally pieced together.

The knife’s freezing teeth crippled her jugular vein, ready to slit it open. The choking pressure made Karen linger a heartbeat too long, one final hesitation. She dropped the blade, letting it crash-land on the hard floor with a deafening thud. Her dinner surged up her oesophagus with no warning signs, eager to flood out of her mouth, carrying something else with it—an unbearable, unrecognisable, primordial hunger that had been asleep within her numb core. Karen didn’t understand why, but she sensed that the only thing that would have kept her alive through the night was another person’s touch. A realisation deeper than any other she had ever known. Perhaps it would have washed the pain away, released the tension in her chest, dried the cold sweat chilling her back. Calmed her heartbeat. Made her stable once again. And she didn’t know how.

The harsh truth resurfaced once more: she had nothing. The outcries in her head plunged into the purest silence. Her deep gasps were the only sound keeping her aware of her own presence—yet not even those filled the vivid vortex of hollowness inside her.

She had no one to watch over her.

She was all alone in a repulsive, lonely world.

This is an excerpt from “The Regressors” by Marco Zampilli. All rights reserved. Date of publishing for the full novel is TBD.

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