The Haunting of Pitmon House (24 page)

While I was trying to reason inside my head and make sense of
the previous summer versus the pictures in my hand, Dominic was badgering me,
asking what my mother would think when she sees them, asking what Uncle Keith
would do when he saw them, asking me what would be left of my life after he
exposed me. I knew Dominic’s weirdness wouldn’t be a defense I could rely on;
the pictures were damning. They weren’t what I experienced, they weren’t what I
actually did — or, at least, what I thought I did — but I’d come off like a
lunatic if I tried to insist the person I had engaged with was a woman, not an
animal. Dominic’s pictures would win that argument, even if they felt queasy
about the fact that he’d taken them.

“What do you want?” I asked, fearful that Dominic was about
to demand sexual favors.

If only that had been the case.

Whereas the previous summer at the lake had been like a
paradise, the ensuing days following my confrontation with Dominic were a
living hell. Dominic wasn’t interested in sex with me, although he did seem to
take delight in seeing me nude. His interests were sadistic. He was after
humiliation and torture.

I’m ashamed to say that I submitted. To me, the scandal that
would follow the revelation of the pictures was far worse than the indignities
I suffered at Dominic’s hand over the next several days. He would require me to
meet him in the boathouse, where he would strip me, tie me up, and then inflict
pain. He would scream insults at me, reminding me of the things he’d witnessed
the previous summer, and whip me with various things he could find; a length of
metal chain, a broken rubber belt. When he ordered me to become aroused, if I
did not comply to his satisfaction, he would slice into my skin with a straight
razor on my chest, drawing blood. Then, when I had completed his request, he would
hold my member in his hand and press the blade to the base of it, threatening
to mutilate me. After an hour of such abuse, he would untie me and set a time
for the next day, reminding me that tardiness would result in a photo making
its way under Uncle Keith’s bedroom door.

To say I was in hell was an understatement. I tried to figure
out a way I could bring an end to the torture. I tried reasoning with him; I
think he knew of my gift, and he might have even believed the story I told of
her appearing as a beautiful woman, not an animal — but he wasn’t about to let
me off the hook for it. I began to plot ways I might gain some kind of
upper-hand on him, but nothing seemed to be viable. I considered ending it by
killing myself, but didn’t have the heart for it. I also considered ways I
might put Dominic out of the picture permanently. I was young; murder wasn’t
something I had any knowledge of how to accomplish. So I suffered from day to
day, enduring humiliation and wounds to my flesh.

The solution presented itself the last day of that week, just
before we were preparing to depart for home. Dominic had unwisely insisted on
another boathouse rendezvous while people were packing, and I joined him,
hoping it might be the last encounter and the issue might die down or go away
with our departure from the summer house.

Dominic seemed intent upon some kind of climax to the week.
He’d readied several tools he’d collected from around the house, and once he
had me naked and tied up he showed me each of them, brandishing them in front
of my face and sliding them over my body.

He seemed even more extreme than he’d been the entire week,
as though he knew we’d be physically separated soon, and he wanted to deliver a
particularly painful experience. I began to lose my mind with fear and anxiety,
and when he produced a blowtorch, I lost it completely.

I had always kept my mouth shut during the previous torture
sessions, since Dominic liked seeing me stifle the urge to yell; it made him
feel even more in control. Now I couldn’t keep quiet any longer, and I screamed
loudly.

He buried a dirty rag in my mouth within seconds, silencing
me. “You like the idea of the torch, huh?” he asked, wrapping tape around my
head to hold the rag inside my mouth. My muffled screams were now a fraction of
what they had been, and I knew no one would hear me. I tried moving to loosen
the ropes, but this resulted in him becoming more irate.

“You’re making me very angry,” Dominic said, lighting the
blowtorch. “I think the blowtorch is exactly what you need to learn who’s in
charge. I think you’ll like the warmth on your skin. It’ll feel like the
insides of that beast you were fucking. Shall I start here with your cock?”

He ignited the torch and I screamed, twisting and turning,
trying to break free. It was no use; I was tied down solidly and silently. I
could twist against the ropes for hours and still wouldn’t be free.

“Let’s save the cock for later,” he said, lowering the
blowtorch to my foot. At first I felt only heat, but it quickly changed to a searing
pain. I could smell my flesh burning as he held the torch to my ankle, raising
it to my shin. It was agonizing in a way I can barely describe.

I screamed and screamed into the rag, but it only made
Dominic more excited. “You really like it, don’t you!” he said. I shook my head
no, but he ignored me. “I know you do. You’re a sick little bastard who thinks
he’s better than everyone else because you can see things. Can you see how your
skin is turning red? How the first layer is peeling back already?”

Dominic’s pants were tented, and I knew he was in such a
delirious state of sick excitement he was never going to stop. I was seconds
from passing out from the pain when I saw Dominic look up, and lower the
blowtorch from my leg.

The rest of it was a bit of a blur. Dominic’s father, Louis,
had come into the boathouse, looking for him. From what I learned later,
Dominic had become so obsessed with the idea of torturing me one last time, he forgot
his family’s departure schedule. I have no doubt that Louis would have tried to
reframe the event as something other than what it was, making me the villain
and Dominic the innocent, except for the fact that moments after Louis walked
into the boathouse, he was followed by my father, who was also looking for me.

I remember being carried out and covered up, then I went to
sleep, not reviving until we were in a car on the way home. My leg had been
bandaged. I began screaming in pain in the car, and my mother administered some
kind of pain killer to me that knocked me out, allowing me to make it the rest
of the way home without awareness.

There was a meeting of the minds between Louis and my father.
With Keith’s congressional election underway, they both agreed to keep the
incident quiet, not wanting to raise any kind of scandal that might hurt their
brother. I was questioned by my father about the incident, and I told him
Dominic had tricked me into being tied up. I have no idea what story Dominic
told Louis.

The pictures never surfaced, and were never brought up. I
suspected Dominic realized they’d not act as much of a defense, given he’d been
caught red-handed, and that they just would have added to the scandal his
father was trying to suppress. I reasoned that Dominic must have decided to
keep them for another day.

For many years I never saw Dominic, much to my relief. He
never came to any of the subsequent family summer retreats, his father having
banned his attendance due to the incident, but telling others Dominic was
working in another city, and unable to attend.

I met Sydney each of the years our family travelled to
Traverse City, and rekindled our affair, which remained passionate and exciting
to me. She would never take my offer of moving to Wisconsin to be with me, and
I knew she didn’t want me living with her, either. I told her what had happened
with Dominic, and she seemed unconcerned. I did ask her why the photos turned
out the way they did, showing her as an animal instead of the beautiful woman I
saw and interacted with. She explained that we had a special connection, and
that I saw her how she truly was, and not as the creature non-gifted people
saw.

Never was I able to see her as the pictures had shown her;
every time we met, she appeared even more lovely than the last, and after a
while I lost interest in the photos, and what her nature might have truly been.

I also began to fear Dominic’s pictures less and less as time
went on. It’s funny how, as you get older, you care less about what people
might think. I know that the woman I made love to that summer wasn’t an animal
— at least, not an animal when I touched her — and if anyone wound up finding
out about it, well, I lost interest in what their opinion might be. Fear is an
awful thing to live with, and my mind found a way to push it out just like my
body eventually pushed out splinters.

She died several years after that — I was still young, not
yet forty. She left everything she had to me, which wasn’t much, along with an
odd request; she asked that I not bury her body, that I keep her bones with me
until I died. It was a request she made in the heat of passion, and since I
would have done anything for her, I agreed to it.

Many, many years later, things in my life conspired against
me; business and relatives, mainly, and I was unsuccessful in countering their
impact. As an old widower, I found myself in dire straits, and Pitmon House
became salvation for me, a way to live on the meager Social Security payment I
received, while having a roof over my head. I counted myself lucky to be able
to take advantage of my Uncle’s vision for a better existence for the elderly,
something that, due to the government’s rejection of his proposals, wound up
being used solely by members of Uncle Keith’s family. I moved in, determined to
live out the rest of my days at Pitmon House. It was an enviable determination,
too…the house was beautiful, and my room was as finely appointed as any fancy
hotel. I was grateful for it, and all settled in, when a horror from my past
resurfaced.

I’d met most of the other residents of Pitmon House in the
first few days I was there. Only twenty or so people could be housed there, so
it wasn’t hard to get around to everyone. I remember the exact moment when I
laid eyes upon the last resident I hadn’t yet met.

I was seated in the drawing room of the house, next to the
fireplace, reading
The
New York Times
, as I did every morning. I swear I felt the old pain from
my damaged foot flare up just as someone sat across from me and said, “I guess
it’s time we said hello.”

I lowered the paper. There he was, smiling. His eyes
reflected the fire, dancing with yellow and red. He looked positively demonic.

I felt my heart sink; my dreams for a quiet and pleasant
twilight slipped away. If I had to share a house with this person, it was going
to be a nightmare.

“Dominic,” I said.

“Jonah,” he replied. “Do you think they’ll kick you out of
here once they learn you’re an animal fucker?”

And it started again.

He wasn’t holding my youth and reputation over me this time;
he knew that I was too old to care about those things. What he was holding over
me was the comfort of retirement, of being in Pitmon House. Would they kick me
out if the endowment board knew of the pictures? I don’t know. The family had
always been sensitive to scandal, even after Uncle Keith’s political years. The
idea of being out on the street, without anywhere to live, was a powerful thing
to hold over me, and he knew it. I was terrified of the potential.

And then there was Tena. She had become friends with him
years earlier, after she and her husband Kendall moved into Pitmon House. She
was clearly gifted, and I think she educated Dominic about me, explaining what
it meant to enter the River, even though it wasn’t anything he could do. She
was certainly as sick and twisted as Dominic. They acted as a terrible team,
abusing me for years, making me submit to routine humiliations. After a while I
became inured to it. Thankfully Tena modulated him in a way, stopping him from
committing acts that might backfire, such as what happened with the blowtorch.
They satisfied themselves with verbal abuse and tying me up. Dominic would
occasionally bring out a knife, and threaten to cut me if I didn’t become
aroused, but he never sliced into my skin. I could tell that he wanted to,
however, and that Tena made sure he stopped before going too far.

They both know about Sydney, and about her bones. During
several of their extended torture sessions they both extracted every bit of
detail about my relationship with her. Tena has developed a deep hatred of
Sydney, or, at least, of her memory. She has accused me of murdering my
neighbors with Sydney’s bones. She claims that they infected Colleen and
Philip, who had rooms on either side of me. While it’s true that they both
developed diseases and died, that’s also true of most of the others who live
here. It’s an old folks’ home. People die. The chest I keep in my closet has
nothing to do with that. Tena’s wrong about her, just as Dominic was wrong.
Sydney was no animal; she was the love of my life, and I miss her terribly. Her
bones are the way she wanted me to remember her, and I’ll be damned if I’m
going to surrender them to pacify Tena.

I recently learned that Tena is not long for this world; a
diagnosis of throat cancer was made, and they see no way to cure it. I will be
happy when she goes, and I only wish that Dominic could go with her.