Yuki

The noise was intolerable to the little old man.

It was there everywhere he went, pounding his hears, assailing his mind with secret silent screams and whispers and fantasies and credit card details and everything. It started only a few months back when all the refugees moved into the block.

The old man honestly thought he would go insane; he even tried to put a pneumatic drill through the left side of his skull where he knew dreams came from and bore out the voices.

But one day, little old Hector Drood found a way to silence the sounds of the world. What, you may ask, was this miracle cure to stop the unendurable blare?

Why, little old Hector Drood decided to start killing off everyone in the block, because only then could he kill off the noise.

Hector was like any other old age pensioner. He had worked all his life, paid his taxes to a Queen he didn’t even know, he married and had children and lost them all.

Now he was old and alone and worse, he was bitter and angry with everyone. Children in the block would snigger and point at the old man who wore tatty clothes and giggle at his sad attempt to look younger with his little cap turned backwards perched awkwardly on his balding, wispy haired head.

Hector despised them all, the parents who had children at such a young age, pushing prams along the estate while sucking on lolly pops with their dirty looking boyfriends wearing better clothes than their children. Hector longed to see them all scream and burn but he was just a little, impotent old man, he couldn’t do anything.

Hector had fought wars for his country and what did he get in return? Fuck all apart from a dirty flat in an impoverished part of London, The Arcade Street Block, where nobody went unless they lived there. The lifts were unsteady and the stairs had leftover syringes strewn around haphazardly for children to pick up as well as all the immigrants stuck around the block. They came from Japan mainly, something that was a particular gripe with old Hector Drood due to his ex wife being Japanese. All the unwanted memories would burst through the noise in his brain and taunt him and remind him of his failures as a man and a father.

But Hector discovered he had a power that would change him forever. He used it by accident but the feelings were beautiful: a miasma of orgasms, an explosion of silence and a bouquet of adrenaline.

It happened one day when the old man was hobbling slowly up the stairs because the lifts had broken down with two teenage mothers inside. Hector could hear their cries of indignation from the shaft as he climbed the steep stairs, how he wished the two girls would shut up.

"I the cables would snap and you would fall and die!"

So when the sturdy cables supporting the lift cart snapped instantly and plunged the two girls to their deaths, Hector couldn’t quite believe it. He didn’t mishear the cables snapping or the two plaintive screams of the annoying teenagers.

And that was how Hector Drood’s reign of terror began.

One fun night involved a gang of drunken youths partying on the roof of The Arcade Street Block, throwing insults and acting generally bratty. Hector was in a particularly bad mood due to the sheer power of the voices in his head – the old man had surmised that he was somehow connected up to everyone in the block mentally.