Happy Hobbies

Everybody enjoys  having a hobby.  Having a hobby keeps people busy, gives them something to do and keeps people happy.

Clive was no different to any other person.  His hobby kept him occupied too and made him very happy.  Very happy indeed.  Ecstatic in fact, and Clive was busy with his hobby now.

His hobby made Clive feel  alive, he knew this and he felt his heart beating fast now, he felt his blood pumping faster around his veins.  He felt great.

Clive stood in the middle of the room, in a state of trance thinking back five years to when he accidently stumbled across his hobby.  To when he accidently stumbled upon his wife and best friend in bed together.  Rage took over, he saw red, that’s all he saw as he ran towards them.

Of course his wife was dead now, his best friend too.  They had helped him discover  his new, favourite hobby.  The hobby that made him happy.  Happier than any of the old hobbies he used to have, fishing,  golf and chess.  Although this hobby was also a game of sorts also.  To keep one step ahead, like chess.

The moonlight lit the room up a white ghostly glow and Clive smiled as he looked down at his elderly victims laying dead on the floor in front of him, strangled.  

They were a popular couple about town but  after the old man kept complaining about Clive’s trees blocking the sunlight into his garden, then Clive had to indulge in his favourite hobby again.

At the back of Clive’s mind something kept screaming out to him that what he was doing was wrong, so wrong.  But Clive couldn’t help himself and each time he carried out his hobby he wanted to do it again and again.  At last he found what made him truly happy.

In the dim moonlight Clive rubbed his leather gloved hands together, in mock gesture of what he had done to the old couple.  A photograph on the mantelpiece at the other side of the small bungalow living room caught his attention.  In the photograph were the couple, smiling, happy.  They were surrounded by two beautiful daughters on either side and three grandchildren sat in front of them.

One of the daughters he recognised.  She had joined in an heated discussion he had had with the recently deceased couple.  She looked so posh, so well to do, although she had come out with the worst profanities he had heard in his Forty Eight years.

Clive knew that what he had done wouldn’t make the family happy like he was now.  Quite the opposite.  There would be much anguish, upset, bitterness and anger within the family as well as confusion.  This made Clive grin widely to himself.  At last he had power.  Power to take life.  Power to decide who lived and who didn’t.  He had never felt that before.  

He had his ex-wife and best friend to thank for that.  At least she had done something for him in the fifteen years they had been together.  He thought back to the last image of his wife and her lover.  They were staring up unseeing at him at the bottom of a hole he had dug far into the middle of the woods.  He was sure they would never be found.  It also helped they were telling family and friends they were planning to run away together to Tenerife to start a bar and a new life. 

As ever Clive was the last to know.  It was just luck, for him at least, that he had got sacked that day from his mundane office job and so went home early.  Anger and frustration already building up inside him.

That would have been the end of the matter until he ran into his old boss.  The one who had sacked him on that fateful day.  She was now lying at the bottom of a canal, weighed down with a large boulder.  It was then he realised he was good at something, although not ethical but something that made him happy, that he enjoyed. 

He felt he was getting better at his hobby, as he was careful not to leave any DNA evidence lying around.  That was thanks in part to being forced to watch the CSI programmes he at first thought so boring but now became a manual to follow, by his ex-wife.

The present situation came back into his mind.  Clive carefully looked around the room using the glow of the moonlight as his torch.  He wore leather gloves, made sure he left no footprints and used the dark to make his escape.

After a few moments of looking around the small, comfortable living room Clive was satisfied he had left nothing.  He had carefully laid some furniture on the floor, a lamp, old ornaments which he hoped would look like a burglary which had been disturbed and the couple had been killed as they had interrupted being burgled.

Clive looked back down at the old couple.  He was happy with how it had all gone tonight and he felt the rush of euphoria as he had with the rest of his kills.

Clive crept slowly and carefully past his newest conquest and as he left the room he caught a glance of the photograph he had looked at earlier.

He looked at the daughter who had shouted at him weeks before with the couple and was even happier as he left the bungalow for he now knew his next prey.