Part I

 What is a scientist after all? It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what's going on.
― Jacques Cousteau

If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
― Albert Einstein

I.

    Unlike most habits, James does not acquire it naturally, or by accident. He is fully aware of himself the first time it happens.
    He knowingly plans it, to a tee, the way a scientists plots a very specific experiment. Every aspect has been stored away in his mind like a shelf full of matching encyclopedias in a library, any one of which he can go back to and reference whenever necessary. In fact, the idea first sprang from a book. A tattered, second-hand copy of a stage-script for 'Arsenic and Old Lace'. How it wound up in the bookshop, he hasn't the foggiest, seeing how they don't normally sell things like that. Or, at least they haven't since he inherited the place. But when the dull hours of the workday make him bored and fidgety, as always, and he winds up searching through the Murder/Mystery section for something to take his hapless and under-stimulated mind away from the world, like always, he hones in on it. Drawn to it like a coin to a magnet. And even though he's already seen the film, knows the plot and characters well enough, something sparks in his mind like a match to a pile of gasoline doused rags when he flips to that initial scene where Mortimer first discovers his aunt's dubious pastime.
    And he finds himself wondering. Pondering about the possibilities of such a scenario, and if (and how) it might work in the real world.
    Brain revitalized, mind once again given purpose. How long had it been? Not since University, he reckons.
    That initial flicker of a thought - I wonder - stays with him longer than it ought to, with him mulling it over almost constantly by the end until it blossoms into a full blown ambition, and before long he has bought and hidden a bottle of arsenic in the kitchen behind the main section of the store.
    Throughout these beginnings, he never once stops to question himself or his sanity. 
    Even now, as he sits stone-still and facing a man in rags on the other side of his breakfast table, watching, eyes wide and breath tiny, as the homeless guest greedily partakes of all that has been offered him, his sanity is the furthest thing from his mind. All he cares about is finding out if it could work. In a wink the jam and biscuits are gone, and the tea cup is empty. Before the man can ask for seconds he is ready with a glass of wine to finish off the meal. The man stares up at him, blinking back tears, utterly unbelieving at the kindness he is being shown. This is enough to halt even the most heartless scientists, to be staring into the eyes of the frog before it is directed.
    He bites back his anxieties, a strange mix of frightful apprehension and barely containable excitement, forcing himself to remain detached and think of the cause - the theory, the answer he seeks.
    Scientist. Like a scientist.
    He hands the man the glass. Watches him drink with all the scrutiny of a snake eyeing a mouse.
    The stranger doesn't make it past the first gulp before the poison begins to take effect.
    He watches the man die as if in a dream. It hardly seems real. Afterward, he drags the body down to the storage cellar and props it behind a stack of boxes containing unsold copies of some book or another. It isn't until he's washed the last dish in the kitchen, toweled it dry and placed it neatly back into the cupboard, that it dawns on him. That he realizes what he has done, and the consequences that might follow.
    He finds himself running through his own mind, panic-stricken and desperate to get his hands on the encyclopedias he's stored away. Standing silently in the kitchen, he flips through them, one after the other, reassuring himself that no one will ever know - will ever find out. Not his mother, not the police, not anybody. He chose his first victim (no no - subject, it was scientific) by sheer chance, just a homeless man he'd happened across in the streets earlier that day. But it wasn't though he hadn't been looking, it was only that he hadn't expected to put the plan into action so soon. And now that it was over, he could not but feel that he had made some sort of mistake. He hadn't, he was scrupulous, and during their brief time together the man had given no word or sign of family or friends, even when questioned about his origins.
    Still, those first few nights find James unable to sleep, dreading the idea that some monstrous version of Dick Tracey would break his door down and put a bullet between his eyes without so much as a "You're under arrest for the murder of -".
    Eventually, his fear dissipates when his more logical side regains control over his own flustering hysteria, and he gently convinces himself that he is being silly.
    He reminds himself that his experiment was a success, and takes comfort in the fact that he did it without getting caught.
    Him, an ordinary man, a boring bookshop owner and caretaker of a little old woman.
    This sense of self satisfaction is short lived, and the guilt that follows is surreal. There is no amount of self persuasion that can soothe it, no relief available. No matter how many psychology books he flips worriedly through during his breaks. No matter how many different ways he tells himself the man he killed was better off dead, for a multitude of sensible reasons. The guilt stays with him.
    But time does not stop, and several months pass before the memory of the strange man dying in his kitchen subsides. He makes it a point one day to visit the corpse in the basement. The smell is overwhelming, but the sight is worse. He attempts to coax the guilt back out of hiding, if in fact it has hidden at all. He feels the slightest touch of sympathy for the rotting body, and then it's gone. He understands that the guilt will remain with him, but dimmer in comparison to that same outspoken ambition that - much to his surprise - returns with gusto, along with the memory of himself, handing the man the glass of wine.
    The conclusion he comes to is blunt and simple.
    More experiments must be run.
    Yes, he thinks. Be a scientist.
    The need to complete them is overwhelming. The question rises up again, persistent in it's asking. How many more can he kill before getting caught? 
    Time continues, and he finds himself plotting a second round of it.
    This time, he keeps a journal. A physical one, rather than a mental one. He does his best to gauge his own reactions as well as document occurrences. He is curious to find himself reacting in the same way afterward - fear first, then guilt, followed by a resurgence of that same, strange urge to do it again. He makes a note regarding this and plans to look it up some time in the future, but he forgets and in the end he never gets around to it, too preoccupied by his new-found hobby.
    Before long he has dispatched with four more drifters, all homeless vagrants he finds wandering the streets. He schedules them, one per month, always on the last Friday of every month, careful to choose each individual weeks in advance, to ensure he has enough time to plan accordingly. He invites them into the kitchen of his bookshop, always after-hours, and always bringing them in through the back door, careful not to rouse his bedridden mother resting in the flat just above. He gives them the arsenic-laced wine, and soon he had a neat little stack of bodies in the cellar, piled almost as high as the boxes of inside books. Carrying them down the stairs has become a chore, but he finds the invigoration that comes with the overall act far outweighs this small inconvenience. He dispenses with the smell using a number of convenient household chemicals, and a recipe he finds in a book. Books. Handiest things on the planet.
   
    A year passes.
    Work is tedious, and James spends most of that time in a robotic haze, removed and uncaring, or recalling (through a compiled haze of fondness and wrongdoing, dispatching his dinner guests). He spends his weekdays holed away in the family bookshop, as always, and the weekends in the tiny, cramped flat that houses his mother. Getting her drinks, making her meals, emptying her bedpan and carrying her to the shower to help her bathe. If he wasn't tending to some blank-faced customer he was tending to his mother, and in the few seconds of peace he happens to get he will slink down behind the counter and read one of his coveted murder-mystery novels, or add another passage to his journal. He plots, as best he can, in his head. It becomes second nature to him, even despite the destruction of the occasional customer. He remains adamant that he would absolutely adore his life, if the variable of work and his mother were removed from the equation. At any rate, at least he has a hobby he enjoys. Something worth living for, something to invest himself in, to get excited about.
    James accumulates bodies, and scans the papers.
    No news ever mentions him, article or otherwise.
    Sometimes he wishes they would break down his door and drag him away.
    He hates himself for this monstrous obsession. He knows it's wrong, and it's not that he's bad, or evil, or even crazy.
    It's an addiction, and while he fully acknowledges this fact, while simultaneously accepting that there is very little he can do about it now - this far into things - he also acknowledges (around about mid-October) that the cellar is getting very full, and he will soon run out of room.
    Luckily for him, he meets Michael shortly thereafter.