Look who’s dead. Let’s have a drink.
In reality, I don’t know that I could ever bring myself to suck her back into the reality that was our upbringing. Perhaps she had escaped it entirely, living elsewhere both physically and mentally, unaware that she had kids to begin with. And again, while I loved my mom, inviting her back to that chunk of her life would be a slap to the face, and that’s one blow that I’m unwilling to deliver.
Fourteen
Christmas was always a tricky time for my family. Dad would usually make Mom put up a Christmas tree for the sole purpose of the façade of normalcy in case we had company other than Keroth. I had heard some of the traditions that other families observe around then, but without context, it was worthless to me, like trying to glue glue to glue. Names of movies and allusions that I didn’t understand flew over my head as my peers laughed and stuck bits of green and red tissue paper to cardstock to make a wreath.
As I grew up, and especially after leaving Dad’s house, I tried to follow what happens with Christmas, but I suppose that, similar to language, that’s a thing best learned as a child. The magic of Christmas, to me, will always be in egg nog and snuggling deeply in my blankets while the fog stares in at me from the outside.
The only difference this time around was that I actually had someone to whom to give a gift: Beth. I got her a teddy bear, which was met with an eye roll, until I had her squeeze it, causing it to shout, “Go fuck yourself!” She loved it. She briefly considered giving it to Patrick, but decided that even his emotional turmoil wasn’t worth giving up a gift so perfect.
She got me a bat, a play on an inside joke born a month or so prior, when I made a joke using the only available ‘bat’ in the room to complete my Batman impression. I immediately began keeping that bat under my bed. She’d written on it: Go get ’em, Batman!
January flew by in a monochromatic blur, gray and gray dulling the passage of time, and February was largely the same, only punctuated by a burst of red and pink for Valentine’s Day.
March and April were both a lion and a lamb, chasing each other with all of the vigor that Mother Nature could muster.
May opened the door to summertime, one in which my eagerness to be active was much more easily accommodated. Independence Day was celebrated with a squad barbecue, and it turned out that Murdock was a pretty good cook. He was disconcertingly reluctant to divulge his hamburger recipe, though.
September faded into October, and Beth was more or less her regular self again. She’d put on a layer of two of sarcasm over the months, but it was without bitterness, and most often made me laugh.
November came. Over time, I had accumulated enough evidence to pin Keroth, Orion willing. I knew where my dad would be and when. By that point, I could look at my watch and, at any given time, know exactly where my dad was. And the day had come. I finished up with some insignificant work at the office; though, next to what I was about to do, just about anything, by comparison, would seem insignificant.
I watched him stumble out of the twenty-four-hour bar on his way back to his place. He had to cross the park to get there, which was a fortunate convenience; I was planning to dump his body there anyway, but when I realized that he would be passing through there without my touch, I allowed him to do so. Less work for me, really.
I followed him into the dark park, and averted my eyes while he leaned against a tree to take a piss. He wandered, stumbled, traipsed along the west bank of the pond. Just a little farther.
He rounded the northern side, moving eastward now. I quickened my pace to catch up to him, an easy feat in his inebriated state. Admittedly, I had hoped that he would be sober for this encounter, but this route was an opportunity that I couldn’t dismiss, and sober was a state that he wasn’t in when he took this route.
Approaching from behind, I steered him onto the dock, to our right. It took him a few seconds to realize that his sudden instability was the result of an outside force, and not his own missteps.
“Hey, fuck off, yo—” He turned and looked at me and, if coffee isn’t a reliable way to sober up, your now-grown son that you molested throughout childhood approaching and shoving you from behind on a dark night ought to do it. He looked mortified, which pleased me more than I like to admit, even to myself.
The tension of the situation permeated the alcohol membrane around his brain, and his eyes widened. His jaw dropped, and his hands trembled. Good.
I wanted this asshole to experience even just a fraction of the fear that he inflicted upon us while we were growing up. I needed him to suffer, if only for a moment. While much of this was driven by balance and a sense of right and wrong, I indulged that small other part that wanted this purely out of vengeance.
“What the hell are you doing?” he said, recognizing mid-sentence that he was no longer intimidating to me, sober or otherwise. He took a step back and stumbled, now trying to decide which was more dangerous: me or the combination of his drunkenness and his precarious footing on a dock over a dark pond.
I said nothing, but held up three photographs, side by side by side. They were of Ellen Marie Dodge. The first was one of the photos taken while she was alive. The second was the one that I lifted from Dad’s house. The third was the one of the body, bloated and decayed.
I watched my dad’s eyes rest for a second on the first, flick to the second, then dart almost immediately to the third, where they rested for several seconds.
“I didn’t … I don’t …” he said.
“Your old friend,” I said. “Look familiar?”
“The fuck are you …” I could tell that this bumbling was less from alcohol and more from mortal fear. I basked in it. His eyes widened, his pupils dilated and reflecting the light of the only nearby street light in a tiny glint.
I whipped him around and cuffed him, then pushed him off the dock, onto the nearest boat. It heaved with his weight, then less so with mine as I jumped in afterward. He fought my movements, but he was too drunk, and I filled with too much conviction, to afford him any sway.
I bent him over starboard and reveled in his squeals for mercy. I went through a dozen lines that I could have delivered, mostly pointing out and drinking in the delicious irony of the situation, but decided that there was no string of words known to me that could have expressed everything that I wanted to say to him over the years, but didn’t. There wasn’t a Hallmark card for ‘Hey, could you stop touching my peepee?’
But actions speak louder than words.
Keeping my knees on his back, I put on a pair of gloves and drew the knife that I’d stolen from Keroth. His forehead was hot and sweaty, palpable even through my gloves. He struggled against my left hand while my right held the blade. For a wild second, I thought that I would lose control, be overthrown, left to drown in the pond, recipient of the death that I had intended to visit upon my dad.
But I retained control. I gripped his head more with my arm than with my hand, held it against my chest, exposing his throat to the waters below.
In a motion that I expected to be much swifter, I pulled the blade against his neck, and yanked it outward. It resisted slightly, but the result was absolute; his blood immediately began spilling into the blackness below with a sickening splash, and I felt sorry for a moment. Not for my dad, but for contaminating the pond with his taint.
Within seconds, he was no longer fighting, no longer thrashing. He was still, and I breathed deeply. The air had a new quality about it, but I would have to explore that later.
Allowing him to bleed over the side of the boat, I double-checked to make sure that there wasn’t any noticeable amount of blood onboard. There wasn’t, so far as I could discern. I wiped down the side of the boat for any flecks that may have been splashed up from the flow, just in case. When I was satisfied, I took out the lighter that I’d stolen from Keroth so many years ago, and stowed it underneath the bench of the boat, before rowing us back to the dock.
The father-son fishing trip I’d always dreamt
of. Perfect.
I noted how clean the air smelled and tasted in contrast to how I expected it to. I expected the foul, metallic odor of blood, the dull saltiness of sweat and struggle. Instead, my lungs were filled with the deliciously clean park air, accented with a chill that brought a sharp sensation to my inhalations.
Removing my dad’s body from the boat without making a mess of blood proved to be more difficult than I anticipated, and I thus decided to move him as efficiently as I could and worry about the mess later.
A couple of times, my heart skipped a beat as a passing motorist’s headlights swept over the park as they turned on to the main road, but on these occasions, the cars continued driving, their drivers likely too drowsy to notice the odd serial killer and his dad out for a late-night stroll. More than likely I was too deep into the park to catch much light from the average headlight, but the worry wart in me still felt compelled to hide on these occasions.
I dragged the corpse around the damp bank to the opposite side of the pond, which required several rest breaks, and took far more time than I had anticipated. I wasn’t too worried, as I’d given myself all night to carry out my task, but still, a hiccup in any road can be disconcerting if not properly responded to. The obvious alternative would have been to paddle the boat to the bank where I intended to drop him, but the boats are locked up after dark and I left my lock picks at home.
After deciding that I liked where the corpse was, the vile heap of meat serving an almost artistic supplementation to its surroundings, I walked back around the perimeter of the pond to make sure that I hadn’t left any visible, noticeable, identifiable, or otherwise useful evidence in my wake. I took care to tread in the grass rather than in the mud, so as not to leave any useful footprints.
Fifteen
“Sorry, what?” Beth is staring at me. Love is staring at me, mouth open. For a second, Beth looks as if she’s stumbled into a practical joke of which she was not the intended target. After looking at me for a good few seconds, her eyes begin to dart between me and Love, but his expression is frozen and his eyes fixed on me.
When she realizes that she hasn’t misheard me and it isn’t a joke, she inhales sharply, but her eyes remain trained on me, waiting for an explanation, an excuse, anything.
“Please say something,” I say. I want some sort of input from her, something to react to; I have a clear destination in mind for this conversation, but until I know where I am, gauging in which direction to go is impossible. Hell, I may already be at my goal, waiting for the sun to rise to show me so.
Beth swallows hard. “That face you made,” she says, after what seems like an hour. “When you first saw him at the lake. I mean, the morning I texted you. Your reaction.”
I nod.
“Can you do it again?”
I love Beth.
“Beth, I—”
“Shut up. I don’t know why you did it. I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to know. But you’re not the kind of person who would just go and kill out of petty vengeance or jealousy or greed. You may have fooled me otherwise, but this is something that I know about you. So whatever it was … I’m sure it needed to be done.”
She keeps her expression controlled, determined. Beth doesn’t trust easily. The fact that she trusts me even after learning that I murdered my own father tells me that what we have, the friendship that we’ve built over the past couple of years, has been forged of the gods themselves, tempered by the fires of hell and shaped by Hephaestus. This is a friendship built to withstand anything.
“The face,” she says. “Can you do it again?”
“Yes.”
“Good. His funeral will probably be soon. You’ll be having to do that a lot. What’s the plan?”
Before I can register what’s happening and why, I’m crying. A few minutes ago, I was reeling from having gained an ally, an infinite percent increase from the number of allies I’ve had my whole life. And now another one. Beth and Love. They’re on my side.
Not only that, but I have a side now. Prior to this, my forces have been me and me alone, contained in a small sphere optimized for minimal direct confrontation because I knew that I couldn’t handle much on my own. But with three of us, my sphere has expanded and taken on a more definitive shape. Side by side by side, we can make things happen. Keroth won’t know what hit him.
However, in order for Beth to understand what’s going on, she needs to understand the truth, the macabre monster that is my past.
So I tell her.
I tell her about the beatings, about my family, about my dad and his business with Keroth. I tell her about growing up doing my best to appear a perfect child because if I rose eyebrows or drew attention to the very real potential of darkness in my family, the beatings got harder and longer. I tell her about my sister and my mom.
I feel bad telling her all of this, because almost all of it is in direct contrast with the heaping mound of lies I’ve fed her about my family and my background over the years.
But she nods along, letting many parts slam against her emotions filter to be sorted out later, prioritizing instead the logistics and dynamic implications of my dad’s life and death. I see her mind tracking my most recent game of chess, move for carefully planned move.
I omit the parts about my other kills. She can know I’m a killer, but she doesn’t need to know that it’s become something of a mission of mine. At least, not yet. Her mind has suffered quite enough in the past forty-eight hours, and I don’t need to extend that trauma by another decade.
I don’t mention Love in any of this, but surely she’s suspicious as to why he’s not reacting at all. She knows he already knew about it, which would naturally lead her to question why he knew about it, especially when she didn’t, but I think she trusts that I’ll tell her what she needs to know.
I just can’t bring myself to throw Love into the mix on this.
Beth is sitting with one leg dangling over the side of the bed, and Love sits cross-legged and facing me, the comforter up over one knee, the other resting against the headboard. He’s hugging a pillow to his chest, burying his chin in it. He emotionally opted out of this conversation minutes ago.
I should have asked him to excuse us while I explained things to Beth, but if I were in his situation, I would have chosen this over being alone at this time, so I didn’t. Maybe that was a mistake. Hoping Beth would catch the meaning in the look I give her, I reach out and put a hand on Love’s shoulder. He’s warm, but shivering.
At my touch, he looks up, his chin leaving a dent in the pillow where he’d buried it. He sighs, swallows, blinks slowly.
“Sorry,” he says. “I just … didn’t think it would be so intense. All of this. I knew it would be crazy on the outside, but I didn’t think it would be just as bad … inside.” He’s trying to decide whether to let Beth know what’s going on, but the look she gives me tells me that she’s figured it out.
He continues: “When your dad’s murder case went around the office, word also spread that you were his son. It was a bit of a thing, but nothing major. A couple of them were insisting that you be interviewed, but for the most part, it was pity, sympathy. They wouldn’t let me do anything significant on the case because I’m just a rookie floater. But I wanted to know what was going on with it. With you. So when Sanders said he needed someone to do some busy work for you, I volunteered. I didn’t know whether it was related to your dad, but at that point, I was willing to do it because I wanted to talk to you.”
“Why didn’t you just come talk to me?”
“Well, initially, that was the plan. But how was I supposed to approach that? ‘Hey, I’m Todd, your dad molested me, lovely weather we’re having’?”
Beth doesn’t react.
“No. I had to figure out a more tactful way to approach it, in case you weren’t one of his victims. I wasn’t even sure you’d believe me. Most people wouldn’t believe it about their dads unless they had either seen it happening or been a victim of it
, so I wasn’t about to assume that you’d be the exception. But then, while I was still trying to figure out how to go about talking to you about it, my opportunity came.”
I nod.
“And being with you, being around you, I began to understand.” He looks at me, then down at the bed, then back up to me. “You’re a protector. You’re a protector of the innocent, a voice for the oppressed. You put on this show like you’re some scared kid who can’t tie his shoes without help, but really, you’re watching. You’re invested in the lives of the people you care about, and you genuinely want success and wellness for them. And there’s no sacrifice that you won’t make for them. Hell, you went into the house of the guy you suspected took Beth. You went in there ready to do whatever needed to be done, up to and including dying. That’s not the agenda of the random vengeance killer driven by rage and fear. That’s love.”
This guy’s tugging on heartstrings, which is dangerous territory, in both Beth’s and my books. Still, though, I tear up. In my head, my motives have been completely different than what he’s saying, but I consider the possibility that my own perceptions of my driving forces are off, and that maybe I am what he thinks I am.
Love continues: “I get that your dad had to go down. You had to protect any future kids from being his victims. And I am totally on board with that. But a part of me thinks that at least some of your motivation was to … win. To beat him. To be free of the past that he trapped you in. But I think that you beat him a while ago. When you became a functional, independent person with empathy and compassion, that’s when you beat him. That’s when you won.”
Ah, fuck. Actual tears. The bastard hit home, the way that only a fellow sufferer of this emotional bullshit would know how. Beth is staring at the comforter, playing with it and picking at it with her bruised hands. It’s mutually understood that she was listening to that entire thing, but she’s giving me the option now to move on without inviting a reaction from her.
[Darkthorn 01.0] Pond Scum Page 11