The Book of Paul -- A Paranormal Thriller (4 page)

She did. Martin had a really big one. Figures. Why should someone who couldn’t care less if he used it or not get a really big one? The head of his cock pushed its way out the leg of his gym shorts and was still growing down his thigh. Rose knew her mouth had to be open as she watched its progress, but she couldn’t do anything about it. When she looked back at his face, she was even more shocked to see he was completely oblivious to what was happening. Instead, he turned to the sink and thumped down the big plastic jug.

“Here, use this,” he said proudly, handing her the bottle. “This is the good stuff.”

Rose couldn’t decide which was a bigger turn-on…the man standing there with his big huge cock hanging out his shorts like a fat log, or the fact that he was so blissfully unaffected by it. She reached down, grabbed the big fucker in both hands, looked him straight in the eye and said, “No. This is the good stuff.”

Paul wiped the blood from his hands before lifting the heavy book and placing it gently on the lectern. “That wasn’t too smart, you droppin’ by unannounced,” he chuckled. The body offered no argument. There wouldn’t have been one even if he were still conscious. “So much to do, so little time,” Paul sighed, pulling out the other nails, hog-tying his ankles to his neck, stuffing the body in a burlap sack and hefting it over his shoulder as easily as a bag of flour. He patted the sack on the rump and stomped out of the room, winding through the black corridors before depositing his burden with a thud on the filthy floor of another dark room.

“Have a nice nappy-poo. I’ll be back in time for supper!” he shouted, waving to the still-silent lump as he tromped back through the hallways to his candlelit sanctuary.

He sealed the door behind him and walked to the lectern slowly, deliberately, reaching under his shirt to extract the key dangling from a chain around his neck. He unlocked the wide leather strap binding the massive tome and felt the power course through his veins as soon as he opened the ancient leather binding.

He rubbed his hands gleefully. There was so much fun in store. New friends to meet. Old bonds to renew. Paul relished every encounter. One more than all the rest.

Which isn’t to say that no one else mattered. No, you couldn’t say that. But nothing mattered more than him.

No one was more important than Martin.

She dropped to her knees right there and took him in her mouth. It was a tight fit.

“Wow,” he said. She looked up at him and would have smiled if her lips weren’t stretched so thin.

Martin didn’t have many experiences to compare this to, but he guessed that she was very good at this. She was. She had amazing technique and knew all kinds of special tricks, but she didn’t need any of that now. She was in a higher state of need and she sucked him hard and loud and sloppy. Martin groaned from the intensity of it…of her.

Her tongue was pierced with a stainless-steel barbell she was rubbing on the soft-hard tube of his urethra. He got scared because he knew she must have something in her mouth doing this to him, but he couldn’t imagine what it was or how she got it in there without him seeing it. But he didn’t stay scared. He got harder and he knew he had to do something, something more…but not in here. He needed to do it in there
…
in that room.

Martin picked her up and carried her in. She thought she might pass out from the excitement. He slammed the door behind them and Rose’s heart slammed in her chest.

He paused once they were inside and let the dark lost world wash over them, waiting until the candles and smells and the absolute quiet erased any memory of anything that had ever happened before. Then he gently set her down on the bed and stepped back to watch her sink into the billowy fabric.

Rose looked at him standing there, so still, his hands slightly out to his sides like he was trying to keep his balance. She was afraid for a moment that he might be too tender, but when she saw the heat in his eyes, she relaxed and smiled at him. He looked like he was going to smile back, but his features evened out, smooth and unknowable. She looked down and saw his cock was harder than ever, his gym shorts in a pile around his feet. She unbuttoned the black fabric buttons on the front of her tiny dress and pulled it apart so she could show him her small breasts and the other rings he hadn’t seen yet.

Martin came to her like a big cat, low and lumbering, rolling his shoulders as he crawled on top of her. He moaned as he straddled her naked chest, the softness caressing him, coming from everywhere at once. He paused for a moment on top of her, staring at the rings in her nipples and the long golden chain winding between them like a lazy river. At the end of the chain, a small shiny key drew his attention even more than the nipple rings. He felt his heart tighten with dread, but when he looked closer he saw it wasn’t the same. Still, it looked so familiar. Hadn’t he seen it somewhere before? He tried to remember, but his eyes kept moving, scanning her creamy skin and the crescent moon tattoo and finally resting on her face again. Her smiling face.

When she smiled he felt something move inside his chest. It was more intense than the warmth he felt before, like congestion…but rumbly …louder. As he leaned over to kiss her smiling lips, he noticed a little drop of water had fallen on her chest. On the key. He looked to the ceiling to see if there was some kind of leak, but the angle wasn’t right. The rumble in his chest grew louder when he realized the drop had fallen from his eye.

Call me William. I remember everything. It’s what I do.

I didn’t plan on entering the story so soon, but I just couldn’t take that last scene. Why? Why should it matter to me if they fucked each other’s brains out? I thought you’d never ask.

All these things happened once upon a time in the East Village, when outlaws still roamed, junkies copped and squatters squatted. I lived there too, before gentrification and the unusual events you’re about to witness swept all of us away.

I have a true photographic memory, the kind that guarantees a perfect score in any test, the kind that easily passes itself off as high, perhaps genius intelligence, even if there are no other outward indications that this is the case.

I sit. I watch. I listen. I record. I see all these people, but they don’t see me. I wish things were different. I’m lonely too, like they are. At least I can admit it.

Some of them are better than they seem at first. Some of them are worse, much worse. Sometimes I think evil is just loneliness with nowhere else to go.

Take me for example. All my life I’ve struggled to do the right thing. Well, most of it anyway. I’ve fought hard and long against the darker urges, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. It’s easy to lay the blame on genetics, or on Paul and The Striker. I could even blame Rose if I wanted. But as I watched her and Martin through my closed eyes, as I heard her scream a cry of pleasure I had never heard, seen, felt, or even imagined, something clicked inside my head.

I wish I didn’t see so much. I hate this gift sometimes. When I was younger, I thought everybody had it. I guess I was about six or seven when I mentioned “the eyelid movies” to Mother. She dropped her cup of tea. “You get them too?”

She told me she had them all the time when she was younger and so did her sister. Her sister went a little crazy because of it, she said. That was the most I ever heard Mother talk about her past. She did tell me more about the eyelid movies though. She called them her visions. She said they were really strong when she was younger, then they came less and less frequently. Sometimes they showed the future and the past, but most of the time they were about other people, what they were doing or thinking in the present. It was more like that with me, I learned. Mine never faded away. They got stronger and stronger and stronger. After a while, I didn’t have to close my eyes, though it helped cut out the clutter of whatever else I was looking at. Mirrors and ponds are good too, but I like clear blue skies the best. It feels like I’m looking into another dimension. I suppose that’s true.

Sometimes I can’t see anything. Sometimes the visions are so clear, it’s like I’m in the same room. They were much too clear that fateful morning. I could see everything. I could feel everything too. Their hearts beating. Pounding. My head pounding in a queasy echo. And right before I ran to the bathroom to heave up all the hate churning in my guts, I saw something else.

I wasn’t the only one watching.

The Book was everything. As his blunt fingertips skimmed the crinkled pages, old memories flickered through his mind like the stroboscopic sputtering of a hand-cranked nickelodeon. Paul breathed in deeply, savoring the poignant rhythms of a story that had been told and retold at numberless firesides for countless centuries until it was finally, faithfully recorded in this, the only volume of its kind in existence.

He rifled through the yellowed leaves faster and faster, the words and images cascading in a blinding flurry, pages turning and yes, the Great Wheel turning with them, faster first, then slower and slower, so slowly until…

Paul stopped at the center of the book. He stared at the two blank pages. They had remained forever unmarked, but showed him everything he’d ever known or would ever need to know. His eyes rolled backwards into his head until only the whites were showing. No, not the whites. His vein-etched orbs were the color of coffee-stained teeth. They matched the ancient vellum leaves almost perfectly.

He stared at the pages with iris-less eyes and he saw. Saw Martin in bed with the girl.
That
girl. They’d been circling each other day after day, passing each other on the staircase, shopping in the same deli, flitting to and fro like moths circling a lightbulb, far more oblivious to each other’s existence, to their significance, than he. And now, she was here, driven by the will of her scum-sucking sire, her very presence heralding the prophecy. They had found each other. They had rutted. And even though neither of them had an inkling of what had passed between them, of what it meant or how deeply their connection was ingrained and yes, foretold, they would eventually arrive at the truth of it, and with that truth they would fully awaken. To each other. They would
know
.