The Book of Paul -- A Paranormal Thriller (13 page)

“
Stop it!”
Momma shrieked, rushing in for another attack.

Paul pushed her against the wall with a head-thumping thwack. Her eyes rolled in a lazy orbit that made Martin wonder if he’d killed her. Paul began talking again as if nothing had happened. “Not only did she want to foul your proud virgin member, but she wanted
me
, your own dear daddy, to take me big willy here and…well, I can’t even bring myself to say it.”

Martin couldn’t hold it back anymore. He screamed with a horror so complete that it washed all his senses into the abyss.
“NOOOOOOO!”

Paul had to turn his head to protect his eardrum from the sickening wail. He watched happily as Momma’s eyes slowly focused. Now they were coated with a wet film of fear. She tried to scoot toward the door, but her legs weren’t working right. Paul set Martin on the floor. Martin looked at Momma’s naked, squirming body and felt sad and angry and sick to his stomach. When he saw the bloodstain on the back of the wall where her head made the loud noise, he almost threw up.

Paul opened his brisket-thick hand in front of Martin’s face. Resting on his palm was the most beautiful pistol he had ever seen, a .22-caliber Beretta with a silver-plated grip. It had been custom engraved in Spain. There was a blue ribbon wrapped around the barrel.

“Happy birthday, Martin,” Paul said and kissed him on the forehead.

Martin sobbed uncontrollably. Paul rubbed Martin’s head, soothing him with one hand, holding the pistol in the other. “Shhh-shhh, dear boy. I’m sorry it had to be like this, but it’s the only way. You had to see for yourself that there isn’t a bone in her filthy body worth caring about before you do what needs to be done…just like the boy in the story.”

Martin cried on the floor, as confused as he was horrified. He looked at Momma and the pistol. It was the perfect size for a little boy. When Martin curled his hand around the grip, it felt like part of his own flesh.

“Mahtinnn…” Momma groaned, “Pweeasse…”

There was something wrong with her mouth. The left side was smiling, but the other side seemed to sag a little.

Paul knelt down and whispered to him, cold as ice, “I know you don’t like knives, so I got you this lovely little pistol. Just pull the trigger nice and slow like I taught you, son.”

“I can’t!” Martin sobbed, still clinging to some ancient trace of love for the crumpled body below him, her fluttering eyes darting back and forth between them.

“Kill her now!” Paul demanded. “Don’t feel, boy, just act!”

“Doan, bibby, please,” Momma begged, blood leaking from her lips. She was slurring so badly that Martin could barely understand her.

“Ees da one…” she hissed, wagging a limp finger at Paul, the other arm hanging lifeless by her side. “Ass im abud Noeene.”

“What…?” Martin croaked, trying to decode her garbled moaning.

Paul’s combat boot crushed the part of her face that was still working. Momma tried to make her tongue move, but the gap between the place in her brain that made the words and the place where the words come out was quickly filling with sticky clumps of blood.

“Norine…she’s talking about Norine!” Paul shouted. “Do you know why she hated her so much? She was jealous. Jealous of you and Norine!”

Martin nodded. Hatred rose through his neck, weaving into every crevice of his mind.

Squeeze.

“Remember when she came to pick you up and saw you dancing with Norine?”

Squeeze.

“Remember what she did to you that night…
in the cellar?”

That was it. All the years of torment erupted like vomit from the depths of his soul. From the cellar. “I hate you! I hate you!
I HATE YOU!”
Martin screamed at her, feeling more powerful with each repetition.

“Shoot her, Martin!” Paul hissed, pointing at the place between her breasts. “Shoot her right through her cold black heart!”

Momma begged him with her eyes one last time. Mercy, son. Mercy.

He couldn’t do it…he couldn’t. But his finger squeezed the trigger without his head’s permission. A long, slow, steady squeeze, just like Paul taught him. The
bang
was deafening in the small room, the kick nearly enough to throw the pistol from his hand. But his aim was true. The lead whizzed out like a rocket ship, not at her heart but at the smooth dead center of her forehead. A dimple of red, just a drop really, appeared above her eyes like a shiny red
bindi
. Momma didn’t move. Martin thought he must have done something wrong and began to squeeze the trigger again. Then he saw her eyes. They were changing from a sweat-soaked stare of horror to a milky glaze of utter confusion.

The tiny .22-caliber bullet was ricocheting inside her skull like a pinball, lighting up old memories of love and cruelty as it whipped the spidery gray filaments of her brain into a six-egg omelet. When the lump of lead finished its final twists and turns, there was nothing left of life inside her but the last few twitches of jangling nerves and pulsing capillaries. The same look of bewilderment remained painted on her face as her body slowly crumpled beneath her.

“
Yesssss!”
Paul shouted at the top of his lungs, sweeping the little boy up in his arms. “
You did it! You did it!
YOU DID IT!”

Martin’s face lit up in a rainbow of triumph and vindication...his smile beaming from ear to ear and back again. Yet, as he watched the drops of blood ooze slowly from his mother’s nostrils he felt an emptiness rising from his toes and burrowing into his chest. The switch clicked again, so hard he could almost hear it. All the feelings he had ever known…love, sadness, hurt, longing…all of them folded up inside his head, tucking themselves away into old wooden cupboards and dark, musty closets where they could never be found again. One by one, the doors closed like an endless hotel corridor. When the final door slammed shut, everything that could have called itself Martin had been silently locked away. And the smile on his face vanished like a wisp of smoke.

Sad, wasn’t it? I almost hated telling you, but I figured you’d want to know. Everybody wants the backstory. Everyone wants to know how people “got that way.” Personally, I don’t think explanations help very much.

They certainly didn’t help with me. I went to therapy for years, digging up all the worms and green goop that were supposed to free me from my demons. The results were less than liberating. I’m not saying I had it worse than Martin, but it was quite horrible in its own way…in its own special way. I won’t go into it now; you’ve already been through enough. Let’s just say it was bad. Take my word for it.

Sometimes I feel sorry for myself. I suppose everybody does now and then, some more than others. But whenever I feel really sad about my lot in life, all the terrible things that happened, all the wonderful things that didn’t, I start to feel really icky about the self-pity too. I guess feeling sorry for myself makes me feel weak. Then I feel ashamed. So instead of just feeling bad about how shitty my life is, I feel bad about my
feelings
about how shitty my life is. All in all, it’s not worth it. Better to hop off the pity-pot and find something else to do.

Actually, that was how this all started. I was feeling sorry for myself. And I was feeling bored with feeling sorry for myself. So I went on the web.

It seems so long ago now, but when I first discovered the website I thought it had to be a joke. I was just prowling around, looking for…well, looking for the stuff I always look for, when I clicked on a link and…
boom!
…there I was, staring face to face with an angry young man, dementedly sticking his tongue out. Not very startling, except for the fact that his tongue was split in two. My immediate appraisal of the blurry low-res image was to guess that it was a Photoshop alteration, poorly done. It was the
poorly done
aspect that captured my attention, drawing me in for a closer investigation that made my stomach churn and tighten. I know a thing or two about Photoshop and if I wanted to make a forked tongue look like it belonged to some Heavy-Metal-Demon-Snake-God, I’d make it long, tapered, slithery, curly, mobile. Not these twin fat lumpy wads of tissue that looked like your pal Jimmy just clipped your tongue in half with a pair of pruning shears. So in the space of a second, the dim light in my head turned on and I realized it had to be real. What the fuck? Why the fuck? Yet there it was. Wag. Wag. The loose flaps of disassociated tongue meat wobbled and flapped in my face, computer animated, moving in crude jerks and flickers. I could have hit the back button and returned to the comparatively warm and fuzzy world of rose tattoo ankle bracelets and diamond stud nose jewelry. I could have shut down the computer, taken a deep breath and walked outside. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. I had to see more. My fist gripped the mouse in a cold, sweaty squeeze that should have popped the little track ball inside. I guided it over the picture and squeezed the clicker on his tortured stubby tongue flap and…
boom
…I was instantly transported to a very innocuous, nicely designed e-zine.

There was a picture of a young girl who looked about nineteen and would have been called pretty by anyone, regardless of all the rings and posts in her face. Still, it was nothing particularly outrageous, certainly not on the level of Snake-Boy, just your usual assortment of eyebrow, lip, nose and ear piercings. There were a variety of articles that also seemed pretty tame, mostly on tattoos and piercings and personal ads where people with a lot of holes could go meet each other and fill them with metal objects. Then way off in the corner was another title that made my arm hairs crinkle up the moment I read it: “Extreme Body Modification.”

Some saner part of me tugged my shoulder and said, “Hey, let’s beat it.” Of course, I ignored my inner wisdom again. Looking back, I would have done anything to prevent myself from clicking on that link. I won’t tell you the name of the URL…it’s real, and it’s still there…but you’ll have to find it for yourself. Nevertheless, I hope you think twice before going there. For most people it wouldn’t be a very big deal, you’d look at one or two pics, puke and go have a good stiff drink. But if you’re like me…

I suppose I’ve always had a morbid fascination with gore. When I was a kid, I used to read
Famous Monsters of Filmland.
The magazine had a glossy color cover and cheap black-and-white newsprint inside. I’d leaf through the pages, checking out pictures of vampires and werewolves and what I loved most...the black-and-white shots of the Famous Monster’s victims. Black blood. I liked it better that way. It was much more frightening. The color photos with their fake blood and fake shiny guts and fake hanging eyeballs looked...fake. The black-and-white pictures looked real...like
news.

In the early sixties, television was mostly black and white (or maybe mother was too cheap to buy a color set…I’m not quite sure, I was only a boy then). So when people were shot and they grabbed their guts in all those cop shows and westerns, you’d see a trickle of black oozing out from their vests. Black blood.
The Daily News
used to sell gore on the covers too. The body fallen from the seventh-floor window, the bullet-in-the-back-of-the-head mob murder—it was there on the front page for all to see, in glorious black and white.

I’ve never really lost that fascination. On the contrary, it’s increased quite dramatically over the years. I looked at the picture of the girl with the rings, studs and barbells all over her pretty face and thought that it couldn’t be that bad inside. So I braced myself, clicked the Extreme Body Modification link and…
boom
…I had to fill out a credit card application because this part of the site was for members only. I filled out the application and without a single
boom
, I was greeted with the most shocking, mind-numbing horrors in a lifetime of horror seeking.

Pause. Breathe. Gulp. I couldn’t decide which was more disgusting, the full color images of the actual “feats” accomplished (now that’s real, that’s news!), or the bland Matter O’ Fact pseudo-medical descriptions of the techniques themselves: scalpel piercings, uvula piercings, scrotal implants, transdermal implants, urethral stretching, subincision,
meatonomy!