I’m just an ordinary everyday sociopath so if you would kindly refrain from giving me such a hard time about it. I don’t what you expect from me, I really don’t. Muttering to myself, grumbling away to myself. Blowing sticky saliva bubbles without meaning to. I’m panicking and there’s this voice in my head telling me not to panic. It’s the voice of the panic speaking to me – it’s the panicky voice, the panicky old voice of that old, old panic. ‘Stay calm now’, the voice tells me, ‘stay calm now.’ It’s not a very calm voice, I can tell you that for nothing. It’s loaded with stress. Muttering and rumbling, muttering and grumbling. ‘What’s the mutter with you, for God’s sake?’ you ask me, pissing yourself laughing at your own cleverness. I am full of anger. What you expect from me? What you want from me? Why are you hounding me like this? Free from rust and decay, free from the unsightly blemishes that disfigure us in the eyes of our peers. Free from rust and decay – I’m shining and clean. My face is made of steel and I polish it every day. My elbows are made of vanadium – light but durable. My nostril hairs are made of filaments of the purest most exquisite magnesium. In my own mind I’m a hero of course; my actions are legendary. My eyebrows are legendary. My eyebrows made out of tungsten filament – they can cut through anything. My voice is resonant, melodic, and startlingly pleasant to listen to. I could charm the apples straight down from the tree if I wanted to. I wouldn’t need to shake the tree at all. I could charm the wool off a sheep. My eyebrows are made of frozen light – one of the rarest substances in the entire universe. ‘Stop looking at me like that,’ I whine, ‘can’t you see I’ve got stuff on my mind?’ I’m being eaten alive by guilt of course – guilt about all the things that I didn’t do. I never did anything, you see. Free from rust and decay, free from rust and decay. We all need to learn to mask the evil that is within us do we not, my pretties? Mask it and hide it, mask it and hide it. Mask the evil – until the day comes when we can no longer mask it. And that day always comes does it not, my pretty ones? Of course it does, of course it does. That day comes around before you know it. ‘Mask the evil, mask the evil, mask the evil’. Mask the terrible evil. This is refrain I know so well. A mantra that is always on our lips. And then eventually, through sheer perseverance, we forget about the evil. We clean forget that it’s there and we will swear blind to whoever will listen to us that we are as pure as the driven snow. We will believe it completely, unshakeably, until the day of the revealing draws nigh.