The Book of Paul -- A Paranormal Thriller (15 page)

For a long time after they moved, her father wrote her every week. She wrote him back less frequently. After a few years, his letters became so paranoid and disjointed she stopped writing at all. He said someone wanted to kill her. He told her to wear the necklace all the time. He said a lot of other things that sounded even crazier.

“Remember the story. It’s all coming true. You have to be ready.”

The story. Her mother used to tell her a story every night before she went to bed. She never read from a book or acted like she was making it up as she went along. There were no hesitant pauses or distant gazes out her bedroom window. The story was long enough to fill a dozen books, yet she knew it so well it seemed like her brain was a tape recorder in playback mode. It made her think of Scheherazade and the
One Thousand and One Nights
. Some parts of it even took place in exotic Arabian palaces, Egyptian tombs—Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. Other parts were set on faraway islands with stone circles like Stonehenge and underground caverns ruled by a Fairy Queen. All of it was utterly amazing.

“Mommy, you should write it all down. It would make such a wonderful book,” Rose said one night after she had finished the story all the way through for the third time. It was becoming so familiar to her that she joined in from time to time, shouting out her favorite lines or whispering in the scary parts. There were lots of scary parts.

Mommy smiled weakly and shook her head, tucking her snugly beneath the covers with the saddest look on her face she’d ever seen. She leaned over and kissed her on the forehead and said, “This story is only for telling and remembering. Don’t ever write it down or tell anyone except your own children. It’s a secret family story.” She whispered, trying to sound playful with that sad, sad look still on her face.

Rose never asked her about making a book again. She never had much of a chance. Mommy died a few weeks later. Daddy tried to take over the storytelling a few nights after the funeral, but it made her so sad she just cried until she fell asleep. Then the police came and took him away. For good.

When the letters from her dad came and he talked about the story, Rose felt as sad as she did on the day Mommy died. She cried till her whole face was wet. She felt angry too.

“Why did you do it?” she yelled into her pillow after tearing the letter to shreds.

Because he was crazy. That’s why he was in a nuthouse instead of a prison. She hadn’t spoken or written to him in almost ten years. He never wrote anymore either, but sometimes she heard his voice in her head like he was standing right next to her. His voice never sounded crazy, or angry or impatient. It sounded like he used to sound when he carried her on his shoulders. Kind. Warm. Filled with love.

Crazy or not, she missed him horribly. He was only a forty-minute train ride away. Maybe she should buy a ticket in the morning and see if he was okay. See if he was still…

Shit. Of course, he was still crazy. He wasn’t even close to being the same person he was when Mommy was alive. Even so…even if he did everything they said he did, she still loved him.
I must be a total idiot,
she thought, using her free hand to wipe the tears away.

Rose shivered and tucked the key under her shirt, even more frightened than before. Was it the blurry image of her father’s wounded face as they led him away in shackles? The blackened sky? The angry young men leering at her as they passed her on the sidewalk, their shoulders hunched against the cooling twilight air? No. Her deepest dread sprang from a source more palpable and no less immediate than the shadowy threats around her.

Is he thinking about me?
She instantly regretting the query. If Martin was like most guys, he was probably thinking of anything else. She looked down at all her treasures and suddenly felt sad and foolish. Then she shook her head and picked up the pace, fending off her deepest insecurities with the greatest source of reassurance she could cling to.

He just gave you a big ass bag of gold, sweetheart. He’ll be back.

I didn’t go back to the website for a long time. Well, what I consider a long time…two weeks. It felt like forever. I thought about them all the time. The pictures. The horror. I could see them in my mind, perfectly clear…soft and red and wicked.

I knew I shouldn’t go. If I were covered with tattoos and had titty rings and all that shit it might have made sense for me to investigate the “advanced class.” But go back there just to look? Like a voyeur at a medieval torture session? That was just crazy. Sick. So I kept telling myself no, fighting the urges. Day after day after day passed and the first thing I thought about from the moment I opened my eyes was going over to my desk and starting up the computer and logging on and clicking that mouse and…
boom
…I had to do it I had to do it I couldn’t wait another day, another second!

But I did. Every morning I brushed my teeth and went out for coffee and the paper and sat in the park and waited and waited for the itch to go away. Gradually, bit-by-bit, it did. I went on with my life, uncluttered as it was. I would find a new obsession to distract me, or an old familiar addiction, and put my time gladly in its hands. Every morning got easier until one day…I got up, made a pot of coffee and sat at my desk to fill in some journal entries. And wouldn’t you know it, without a thought or a word or a care in the world, I logged on.

I looked at the web page and I looked at my hands and wondered aloud, but softly, “How did I get here?” The answer didn’t matter anymore. I was here and I had done it. Somehow I had done it, all by myself, but without my permission. I noticed how odd that was and I noticed that I didn’t really care. I noticed something else too, a sign Dante left for me, marking the entrance to the place I would soon call home:

ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE.

Michael breathed out a huge sigh of relief. He tried, didn’t he? Granted, it wasn’t very loud, but it was, undeniably, a knock. Two of them, actually. Knock. Knock. He was about to sneak gratefully back down the stairs when he heard the reply.

“Whooo’s there?” came a sweet, singsong voice.

Bean almost ran down the stairs, but he somehow managed to stand his ground and utter a barely audible “Uh…” in response.

“Uh…who?”

“Michael Bean,” said Michael Bean, his voice stiff with fear.

“The door’s open, Mr. Uh…Bean.”

It sounded like a dare. The uneasy challenge was compounded by the fact that the man behind the door made no move to open it. Bean reached for the worn brass doorknob. The door didn’t look anything like his, or any other door in the crumbling ruin of a building. It was a huge, teak slab with intricately detailed paneling, an ornately carved cross in the center and a fluted doorknob that looked like it came from another century.

“Welllll…” came the singsong voice again, sweeter than before, though now it seemed laced with something else. A threat? Michael turned toward the stairs, but the voice froze him in place. “You’re the boy from downstairs, aren’t you?” it purred.

Bean’s head snapped forward like a compass needle. How the fuck did he know that? He looked for any sign of a peephole, but all he could see was the cross. He stood and stared and felt his legs tremble below him, until finally he reached out his hand to open the door.

“Come in, come in!” Paul warmly greeted him as Michael crossed the threshold. He was so enthralled with the big blond’s hearty laugh and easy manner that it took awhile for the smell to hit him. Paul nodded empathetically when Michael crinkled his nose in disgust. “Squatter’s rights!” he yelled to the ceiling, then lowered his lips to Michael’s ear and whispered conspiratorially, “But you don’t get the right to decent plumbing, eh?”

He laughed too hard at his own joke and slapped Bean even harder on the back. Michael felt another pinprick of fear as the sound of Paul’s laugh echoed down the tomb-quiet hallway. He felt it again as he measured the strength in the meaty hand still resting on his shoulder, stroking it now, soothing it.
Guy’s a fag!
Michael thought, panicking with the deeply ingrained homophobia shared by so many post-adolescent, girlishly attractive, self-professed heterosexual males.
A great big crazy fag!

Paul gazed into his eyes with the most lifeless stare he had ever seen, savoring every squirm. After a few uncomfortable seconds, he asked, “So what brings you here for a visit?”

Michael shook his head to clear it. For a moment, he couldn’t remember where he was or what he was doing here, “I heard screaming,” he said dully.

“You heard screaming, did you?” asked Paul with a trace of skepticism, cupping his hand to his ear and scanning the apartment like a radar dish. “Do you hear any now?”

Michael was about to answer when Paul raised his finger to his lips. They listened again together, hard and long. All was silent at first, then as he strained his ears, Bean thought he could hear a low moaning in the distance. “Someone’s hurt,” he said.

“Aye.” Paul nodded. “Someone’s always hurt. That’s the nature of things, the very hard and coarse nature of the world we live in.”

“Someone’s hurt in there!” Michael shouted, pointing down the blackened corridor.

“Where?” Paul asked innocently, his hand snaking behind Michael’s neck. Bean was about to point again, but he had already crumpled to the floor.

Michael was dreaming. He saw a room filled with candles. There was a big wooden table in the middle of the room and something was on it. Something that was moving. He took a few timid steps toward the quivering shape before he realized it was a man. He took a few more steps before he realized
he
was the man and that his hands and feet were firmly nailed down on an altar. He would have taken a few steps back, but he couldn’t move. He was looking up from the altar now, those long nails holding him down. All he could see was the blurry head of a man leaning over him. The man chuckled softly.

Bean opened his eyes and screamed.

Paul was hovering over him, in the exact position of the blurry shape in his dream. But Michael wasn’t on an altar. He was lying on a dirty couch, staring at a lightbulb that illuminated Paul’s long blond-white hair from behind like a halo.

“What the fuck is going on here?” he shouted, almost in tears.

Paul laughed louder as he saw the look of disorientation flood Michael’s face.

“Where the hell am I?” Bean pleaded. “And who the hell are you?”

“My name is Paul,” he said inside the dead mask. “And this, my son…is home.”