by Adam Lowe
White dots all around.
Shit. Inhale. Exhale.
No, that was just ridiculous. How could someone simply stop being able to breathe?
Hang on, if you stopped breathing.... He pressed a hand against his chest and was comforted by the steady beat of his heart. He wasn’t dead then, which was a relief.
Inhale. Exhale.
Breathing had become his life’s soundtrack over the years, accompanying his night sweats and strains to get to sleep. Amy had once confided in him that she sometimes worried that she’d stop breathing, that she wouldn’t be able to draw enough breath and that she would have to concentrate on breathing for the rest of her life. The fears, she’d said, sounding embarrassed, usually only lasted for a few minutes until she forgot about the process and let her body get on with it again. He’d laughed, telling her it was silly, that your body didn’t just stop breathing. At that time, he’d spent twelve years of nights listening to his breath, hearing it whistle out of his nose, sing out from between his lips, pump into his lungs, keep everything going. He knew it didn’t just stop.
Inhale. Exhale.
He rinsed his face and breathed deeply, the exertion crippling his lungs. He dried his face slowly and carefully and walked back to his bed, taking four or five revitalising breaks on the way.
He laid down, the clock reading 4:14. He didn’t care any more because caring meant thinking and thinking seemed, for some reason, to mean not breathing. All this could be a dream but he didn’t want to test it out.
Inhale. Exhale.
He was terrified. What was he going to do—he couldn’t think about breathing all the time. Or could he? If he didn’t think about breathing, he didn’t breathe—it seemed as simple as that.
Inhale. Exhale.
Okay, that seemed to work okay, you just add the inhale and exhale on the end of your thoughts.
‘Yeah,’ he thought, ‘and look like a complete idiot.’
But then it occurred to him that being in marketing, if he said inhale and exhale at the end of each sentence, people would think he was creative and eccentric. He’d never lose an account and progress further up the ladder than he’d ever thought possible and, who knew, he could even end up a partner.
Inhale. Exhale.
This could be used to his advantage, this could really start to make things happen for him.
He yawned. Sleep was coming, thank God. It had been a long time coming tonight and, what with the presentation tomorrow, he needed some sleep, any sleep, if only an hour at the very least. He could then awake refreshed, win the contract and suddenly be on the fast track to promotion that had been promised him eight years ago.
“This is it,” he said, to prove the point.
Inhale. Exhale.
He felt sleep start to come, welcoming it with the delight that only a true insomniac can. He listened for the blood in his ears, the clicks in his mouth, his breathing...
Inhale. Jesus, that was close. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
Horrible realisation crossed his addled mind—he needed to think about breathing to keep breathing. When was the only time he wasn’t aware of thinking? What was the one thing he welcomed more than anything?
Inhale. Exhale.
He began to cry, his breath catching in his throat, his tears running down his cheeks.
Inhale.
“You bastard,” he yelled, to whatever it was that had given him the gift of insomnia and now laid this dirty trick at his feet.
Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
His sobs caused havoc with his inhaling and exhaling so he tried to calm down and slowly his breathing got back to normal. He pulled his blindfold down and stared into the perfect darkness.
Inhale. Exhale. He put the words to a rhythm. Inhale, huh huh, exhale, huh huh. It worked for quite a while.
Then, at 4:57 am, Tom Davis, still humming something under his breath, fell asleep.
It was almost four days before Tom Davis was found. Amy Worth, worried because she hadn’t been able to raise him on the telephone, used her key to get into his flat. She found him in his bed, blue lipped and pallid, a beatific expression on his face.
Mark West is a member of the British Fantasy Society and a proud Terror Scribe of long-standing. Rainfall Books published his collection, Strange Tales in 2003 and his short novel Conjure in 2009, whilst his novel, In the Rain With the Dead, was published by Pendragon Press in 2005. His novelette The Mill appeared in the BFS-shortlisted anthology We Fade to Grey and has since been published as an ebook by Greyhart Press. He can be contacted through his website at markwest.org.uk. This story was originally published in Enigmatic Tales in March 2000.
Scarred
by Deb Hoag
I
Jauncey Hunter had his first fracture when he was four months old. When he was two, the old man ground a cigarette out on his arm.
People say that Child Protective Services are too quick to rush in. That they see an innocent bruise and concoct a whole imaginary history of abuse and neglect.
Not in Jauncey Hunter’s case. The welfare agency never came for him. His horror went on and on, in the dreary cabin that stank of fried onions and his old man’s boozy shit. Nobody rushed in to rescue him. The neighbors surely heard his thin high screams of pain, the old man’s curses and laughter.
But no one ever came to rescue him.
Because everyone was scared of the old man. They sat behind closed doors and thought, “as long as it’s not me.”
Teachers looked silently at his battered face and took his toneless excuses and did nothing, remembering the last time they had seen the old man rolling through the school, glowering and threatening, a rageful flush burning in his face. And they looked away, not wanting any of those bruises for themselves, not wanting the old man targeting them for reprisal, revenge.
Jauncey’s old man snapped two of his fingers - one as an experiment, to see how hard it would be to do, the next because he liked the sound of the little bastard’s screams so much.
Police took a measured look at what they saw on the boy and thought about that psycho in Belleville who had barricaded himself in his house, kid and wife hostage, and ended up killing two officers before he shot his family and himself. And in a measured way, they decided that the risk outweighed the benefit.
The old man burned the word. “fuck me” across Jauncey’s back with cigarettes. Just for fun, he burned an arrow pointing down over the boy’s softly fuzzed butt cheeks, pointing at his ass. Then he followed his own advice and sodomized his son. Not for the first time.
The local social workers looked at a bulletin board where a tattered newspaper clipping detailed the serial rapes and beating of a dozen CPS workers by a man who felt Child Protective Services had wronged him. They remembered the rivulets of sweat that ran from the old man’s forehead and armpits, the huge rotten bulk of him, the indecent hot eyes, the meaty cruel hands, and decided to wait until more evidence came to light.
As a graduation present from junior high, Jauncey received a concussion, a broken tibia, and the first blast from the old man’s new Taser. And the second, the third, the fourth . . . after that, Jauncey lost count.
After all, the boy went to school, right? And he backed up his old man’s stories one hundred and one percent. Surely, if something was going on, the boy would say something, wouldn’t he? How old was he now—fourteen, fifteen? Old enough to speak up for himself, if something was going on, God damn it.
And then, Jauncey received a present that really mattered.
It came in the form of a closed head injury, when the old man tripped him and he fell against a hard pine stump, knocking himself senseless.
The present was: Freedom.
That night, Jauncey went to sleep with swelling and pressure concentrated around the sensitive frontal lobe of his brain. The area of the brain responsible for certain higher functions, among them empathy, conscience, a sense of right and wrong. Even the ability to love.
Some r
esearchers have a more Darwinian take on what is contained in that section of the brain. “The herd instinct” is something they toss out. That desire to comply, to devote oneself to the good of the group, to obey rules and laws whether one believes in them or not.
It’s also the area which generates the feeling of fear, of reasonable restraint, of dread and regret and reverence.
The swelling increased, pushing the frontal lobe against Jauncey’s skull. Delicate cells were crushed, nerves that raced signals from one section of the brain to another destroyed forever.
The brain may heal, but it does not regenerate. What is destroyed stays destroyed, whether it’s the ability to warm and open in the face of love or the ability to say to the self. “no, I won’t. That wouldn’t be right”.
All those things were cut off from Jauncey’s experience like a lump of butter cut off the stick.
He was sixteen now, a big boy, taking after the old man. He was smart, smart as a whip, although he rarely saw the opportunity to put that intellect to good use.
Today was going to be that day.
He lay in bed for a few minutes, savoring the sensations that were flooding him. Or, he mused, the absence of them. He had no idea why everything had changed from one day to the next, only that it had. It was like he had been listening to really, really loud music for a long time—wasn’t there a story about that somewhere? About a society where smart people had to wear headphones that deluged them with senseless noise all the time to make them dumber, where ballerinas had to drag along heavy weights when they danced, good looking people had to wear ugly masks, some shit like that? Whatever it was, whatever had changed, the fear was gone. The headphones were off. The dread, the horror of waking up to another day on a stained mattress in a filthy cabin, wanting to die, afraid the old man would follow him even in death if he tried to escape that way—it was all gone. Except that now, for some strange reason, he no longer wanted to die. No, not at all.
The solution to all his troubles, the answer to all the bruises, breaks, fractures, sprains, cuts and burns was suddenly, glaringly, obvious.
He would kill the son of a bitch.
Really, really slow. The idea made him smile. Pack 16 years worth of torture and abuse into a few weeks. A little creativity and he was sure he could pull it off. Who would come to the old man’s rescue? Nobody. He’d cut out the bastard’s tongue right off the bat and take his time for the rest.
First, he had to get the old man in a manageable state. Not too hard, when he put his mind to it. He slipped out and down the rutted dirt road to the McNally’s house, quietly twisted open the unlocked back door—careful,, careful!--and padded down the short hall to the liquor cabinet. He laughed pulling the nearly full fifth of Jack off the shelf, hearing McNally and his wife nattering in the living room.
His heart beat a little faster thinking they might hear him and come to see what that noise was, but he realized it was excitement, not fear. A rush, wasn’t that what people called it? He’d lived in bowel churning fear for so long he’d never experienced anticipation before, but he decided he liked it.
He wished they would hear him, so he could swing the liquor bottle and bash in their fat, stupid, fearful faces, their avoidant eyes, their guilty half smiles of acknowledgment whenever they passed him by in the street.
Sure, that smile seemed to say, we know. We all know. It’s our little secret now, isn’t it? But we’re afraid of him, too. Better one small, defenseless boy to bear the brunt than our well-off, well-fed, well-tanned fat-ass selves, isn’t that right, boy? You don’t really mind, do you? Those screams are an exaggeration, aren’t they? Surely, you don’t hurt that bad. If you did, someone else would know, would do something, wouldn’t they?
But they didn’t stop their yackety-yack-yack-yacking for long enough to hear a bowling ball hit a china cabinet, as far as he could tell. So he pulled out his dick in the kitchen and pissed all over their pressed wood kitchen table and the stupid-ass penguin salt and pepper shakers that lived there.
Then, feeling immensely satisfied, Jauncey zipped up his pants and swung out the door, leaving it swinging gently in the early morning breeze.
Before he presented his gift to the old man, Jauncey did a quick search of the old shed out back, the old shed that smelled like grease and gasoline, the shed that was bigger than his bedroom and the witness to many of his beatings. There was a tree handy to the shed, where any number of dispirited hunting dogs had been tied. Sometimes Jauncey had been tied there, too, to make it easier for the old man to hit him when he was getting tired, when his arm was getting tired …
Amused by the memory now, Jauncey searched the shelves, looking for an old paper packet of pain pills that the vet had given them for some long ago dog that had tangled with a bear when the old man was out hunting. Whistling, Jauncey smashed the pills with a hammer, and then dropped them into the whiskey bottle.
Hiding a chuckle with a cough, Jauncey bent his body back into the familiar subservient posture and walked back in the door of the trailer. “Hey, pop? I found a bottle of whiskey out by the truck. You must have set it down when you were coming in last night, and forgot to pick it back up.”
Hair of the dog is a damn good thing when you’re nearly 300 pounds of greasy, hungover rat guts. The old man had swallowed half of it before it even occurred to him to look that particular gift horse in the mouth. And by then, it was way too late.
The thing was, Jauncey discovered, it was also quite a bit of fun.
II
Keenan Bowers was a product of too much methamphetamine and a temporary shortage of rubbers at the local drugstore. His mother had abandoned him in the backseat of an unlocked SUV that still had that yummy new car smell, and while the people to whom the SUV belonged had no interest in keeping the squalling infant for a second longer than necessary, they had taken the time to turn him over to the proper authorities.
He had screamed and shaken and cried through the weeks following his birth, a shriveled little thing that looked more like a tiny wretched mummy than the plump, smiling babies that the baby food commercials invariably showed. Nobody was exactly what effect the drugs had had on his brain, what circuits that should trip hadn’t and what circuits hadn’t tripped that should have. He was odd, and oddly fragile in some ways, something the foster care system had little patience for. So he was pushed and placed and pulled and replaced until he could no longer remember how many families he had stayed with, how many times he had gotten the back of someone’s hand, how many times something he loved had been stolen, forgotten, discarded or broken.
Keenan didn’t like cats. They creeped him out, the way they stared, the way they wouldn’t come when you called them, like they knew something nasty about you that they’d blurt out when you least wanted them too. And even when you got them in your lap, when you petted them nicely, and told them what good, good kitties they were, they’d still flex those needle sharp claws and leave you with your blood leaking out little bloody holes they made in your leg without even caring.
No, Keenan didn’t like cats. Not at all.
Dogs, though, were a different story. Dogs were friendly. They wagged their tails, they pushed their noses under your hand—nudge, nudge—practically begging you to pet them. They’d chase a ball if a guy felt like throwing one. And if you told a dog your secrets, you could bet he’d never, ever tell.
Keenan liked dogs quite a bit. Whenever he got put in a home had a dog, he always figured it was a good sign. After all, if folks liked dogs, they probably wouldn’t mind a boy too much, would they?
At age twelve, he was still scrawny, with flapping hands and eyes too large for his thin face. He hated school, where he got made fun of a lot for his hand-me-down clothes, for his gullibility, his daydreaming. He had poor impulse control, which got him into plenty of trouble in his short life. Mostly of th. “sit down, Keenan! Shut up, Keenan! How could you do that, Keenan?” variety.
He didn’t know, either, honestly. It baf
fled him as much as it baffled his legion of teachers and foster parents.
So when Keenan saw the big, sandy-haired man in the park, throwing a ball for his clumsy, flop-eared beagle puppy, it never even occurred to Keenan to be cautious; to keep walking. Stranger danger and all that stuff they taught him in school? In one ear and out the other, as the saying goes. His glowing eyes glued to the dog, Stranger danger was about as far away from his thoughts as the drought in Africa.
“Hey, mister! Can I throw the ball for your dog for a while?”
And Jauncey Hunter turned slowly, surveying Keenan like he had to give the matter careful consideration. Keenan waited in an agony of anticipation for Jauncey’s decision.
Finally Jauncey smiled, shaking his shaggy hair out of dishwater gray eyes as he did it. “Sure. My arm’s getting kind of tired anyway. But Buddy here is getting pretty close to his dinner time. If you want to come back to my house with me and help me feed him, then you can have a good, long game of catch with him afterward. How does that sound?”
And as simple as that, Keenan hopped into Jauncey’s completely forgettable, comfortably middle-aged van, and disappeared from Perkosee Park.
III
When Keenan came to, he was lying on a narrow bed in a small, rough-timbered shed. There was an ache in his head and a disgusting taste in his mouth. He blinked, and then hauled himself laboriously up into a sitting position. He was hampered in this by the thick leather cuff that anchored him to the metal bed frame.
He could see the puppy, now moving restlessly in a small wire cage on a high wooden table. It looked like a workbench, bare of tools. There was a vise bolted to the far end of the table, and shelves above it where a bunch of junky looking stuff was stored. The man from the park was doing something with the cage, fiddling with the door. When Keenan sat up, he turned and smiled.
“Hey, mister,” said Keenan. He tried to match the smile, but a wave of nausea gripped his stomach like a fist.
Keeping himself from puking took all of Keenan’s concentration for a minute, but when his stomach settled, he tugged experimentally at the cuff. “What’s going on?”