Into Painfreak

by Lee, Edward

  “Your genuineness is intriguing,” he said, still taken aback. While she urinated, he did indeed watch for a moment but there was no trace of Piss-Freak in his eyes. Jessica was very familiar with this species of pervert and had urinated in front of her web-cam many a time.

  Finished, she set the warm cup on the kitchen half-counter, then went around to wash her hands. “I was a drug addict a few years ago, Mr. Roulet,” she admitted. “But those days are over. I’ve got no kids, no psycho ex-husbands or boyfriends, and no pimps. And there are no shady characters in my life. In fact, there is no one in my life, and I’ve busted my ass to make it that way.”

  Mr. Roulet’s busy eyebrows rose. “We seem to have some commonalities, Jessica, which pleases me much. Philosopher and Noble-Prize winner Jean-Paul Sartre asserted that Hell is other people. In the course of my life I’ve observed that his assertion in general is oh-too-true.”

  Whoever this Jean-Paul guy was, she thought, he hit that one out of the park.

  After noting the cup negative-for-drugs result, Mr. Roulet embarked on an exposition: he’d lived in this house his entire life, and the property it sat upon had been in his family since Florida had become a U.S. territory. In fact, the current structure had been built on the original tabby-brick foundation lain in 1822. Whence did these ancestors hail? “From the northern colonies. We were Huguenots from southern France”—he paused for a muffled chuckle—“Calvinists, originally.” After the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685 essentially sanctioned the government to execute all Huguenots who didn’t convert, the Roulets became desperate émigrés, fleeing first to the Massachusetts Bay Colony (where they were not well-received) and then to the Common Wealth of Rhode Island. “We were then kicked out of Providence in the early 1800s, for reasons…unclear,” he went on. “At any rate, my forebears settled here, exactly where we are standing now.” He seemed to grin. “I am the last linear male issue, so to speak, the last of a questionable yet captivating line.”

  Jessica noted some innuendo in his verbal thesis but she didn’t care. Working for this man—however weird he really was—would give her the opportunity to turn her life back around, get back to her education and betterment, and finally sever all needs to consent to petty prostitution with disgusting slobs and never again have to debase herself before a web-cam contingent of sorry losers. She felt something now that she hadn’t felt in a long time: elation.

  “Here is my room,” Mr. Roulet indicated, touching the knob of the door facing the kitchen entrance. “Hopefully you will never have a need to enter it,” he added with another vague, inexplicable grin.

  Okaaaay…

  Then he showed Jessica her own bedroom, accessed by a door at the end of the commodious—and very cluttered—living room. A small but quaint room adorned in old green wall-paper with wainscoting. An old four poster bed with a high mattress. An old dresser, an old nightstand, and an old framed engraving of some place called Bury-St. Edmunds, and English town, she guessed by the look of it. She’d never heard of the place.

  “And never, for any reason, attempt to open this door,” Mr. Roulet told her. He indicated a narrow door next to the bathroom. “It’s perpetually locked, for safety purposes, an old closet in disrepair. I never use it so I’ve never bothered having a contractor here to fix it up.”

  Jessica couldn’t gather how an old closet could be locked for safety purposes but to this notion she merely shrugged. Fine.

  “The last time I was in it, I found quite a rats’ nest. I detest all manner of vermin, as do most. I dumped poison in, and had the door permanently closed,” but it was interesting how he’d said this, with a quaver in his voice, like a method actor missing his mark. Okay by me, she thought. You can have dead bodies in that closet and I could shit care less. All I care about is my $500 a night…

  As she turned to follow Mr. Roulet back to the living room, she noticed an unevenness about the carpet just before this closet door.

  Warped floorboards, perhaps.

  More rules of the house were expounded upon: “You must remain in the house from dusk till dawn, every night. No guests, no visitors, no relatives must never be invited here, ever. Naturally, as a young woman I don’t expect you to curtail your social life for this job, but I’m afraid that this must be pursued only between sun-up and sundown—”

  “I don’t have a social life, Mr. Roulet,” she informed him.

  “Ah, another commonality, for neither do I.” He explained more: she could continue her web-camming from the house but she must never give the address to anyone. If she had “transactional clients,” that was fine, but she must engage in those kinds of rendezvous removed from the premise, and only between sun-up to sun down. “Dusk till dawn is my time; I need you here; that’s what you’re being paid for.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  Bookshelves dominated the living room, along with a few odd portraits—the old family line, Jessica supposed. A long leather couch occupied half of the other side of the room, fronted by a glass coffee table and also a large flat-panel TV. “It’s a 4k, whatever that means. Use the computer all you like; the Netflix password is taped to the table.”

  Goodie! she thought.

  Mr. Roulet stood poised in a manner which presaged something of a coming verbal tractate. “As you’ve ascertained, I’m a man of eccentric habits, but I believe this offends no one when practiced without pompier. As an antiquary and historical scholar for my adult life’s entirety, I’ve collected many old and unusual things—books and relics, mostly—which you now see filling this room,” and his hand gestured the abundant bookshelves and their wares, as some glass display cabinets housing trinkets of one sort or another. “The average person might, indeed, feel certain”—he removed an old grey book from a shelf—“that a volume of mathematical tracts published by Plantin in Antwerp only 100 years after the invention of the printing press would have considerable value”—he removed an Indian arrow head from a case—“or that a Clovis point, chipped by out of chalcedony by a Seminole Indian 13,000 years ago must be very expensive.”

  “Aren’t they?” Jessica asked with a knit brow. “I’d think things that old would go for big money to collectors, museums, and all that.”

  Roulet raised a finger, seemingly delighted. “Ah, you’ve alighted upon my point immediately, my dear. Here is the truth: there’s precious little in this room that has any significant value. It’s junk. That Plantin book? Aside from being perhaps the dullest book ever printed, might fetch 20 dollars at a book show. And this spear-point? One would think that something 13,000 years old would be worth a tidy sum but the fact is there are more of these things in America than there are Starbucks, Walgreens, supermarkets, and McDonald’s combined.” He put the Clovis point back. “It’s all worthless to anyone but me, for sentimental reasons as they’ve been in my family for centuries. However—”

  Jessica thought she was finally getting the message. “The stuff’s worthless but the bad guys outside don’t know that, and they might try to break in and steal it. Well, don’t worry, Mr. Roulet. I’ll guard your stuff from dusk till dawn.”

  “Excellent, I’m so glad you’re receiving my meaning, and my explanation of my habits,” the portly man went on. “Oh, and I feel I’m also obliged to let you know there are hidden cameras all over this room, but since you’re a cam-girl, I can’t imagine that to be a problem.”

  “Not a problem at all, sir—”

  “—but let me hasten to add, that’s only in this room and the kitchen. There are no cameras in your bedroom, nor in the bathroom.”

  “Wouldn’t matter if there were, sir.” She suspected this information was added to make her think twice about stealing anything herself. “I’ve been watched on cameras doing everything from taking a dump, to smearing guacamole on my butt, to stepping on jelly donuts in my bare feet.”

  Mr. Roulet, quite out of character, laughed aloud. “A woman of true perception. You’ve come to grips with the world’s irrationality and ad
apted yourself to it, to your own end.”

  She laughed herself. “I guess you could put it that way.” But one element remained that she needed some elucidation on. “Just so I’m straight on this. If someone does try to break into the house at night, you’ll want me to call the cops, right.”

  His eyebrows jumped. “No, no, you come and get me. Pound on my door till I awaken—I’m a heavy sleeper—and if I don’t rouse—” He lumbered to a small framed engraving of an old manor house in moonlight, with what looked like a cloaked figure in the yard, and he took it off the wall. Taped behind it was a key. “You retrieve this at once, unlock my bedroom door, and come in and wake me up.”

  Cut and dry. “Got it.

  “I’ll need you to use your judgment. Of course, a house this old will generate its share of noises: plumbing, creaking rafters, window frames expanding, the roof settling. You’ll know them when you hear them. Instead, what I’m most concerned with are unusual sounds, untoward noises, things that sound out of place or not-quite-right. Anywhere in the house, from any direction.”

  He must be paranoid, she assumed. He’s paying five hundred a night to listen for noises? Suddenly, the man’s instructions were growing abstruse.

  “Any odd noises from any place in the house,” he went on. “This room, your bedroom, the kitchen, bathroom, laundry room, the, the closet I showed you that’s always locked.”

  Jessica nodded but, again, detected an irreducible falter, a quaver in his voice at this latest reference to the locked closet.

  What is it with him and that fuckin’ closet?

  Yet, again, she didn’t care and wouldn’t question it. This whole gig was about the money and how she could better herself with it.

  “I understand completely, sir, and I want you to know how grateful I am for this opportunity. But—” She paused as if to recollect herself. “What if someone tries to break in some night when you aren’t here?”

  “I will always be here, for I never leave the house. How’s that for eccentric, hmm?” He smiled. “In fact, I haven’t set foot out of this house in seven years.”

  ««—»»

  Jessica settled into the new routine “swimmingly,” and suddenly her life was pleasantly arranged in “apple-pie” order for the first time in her twenty-six years of membership with the human race. From dusk till dawn she did work at her computer while keeping an ear out for Mr. Roulet’s “untoward” noises, which never revealed themselves. She would sleep early in the day, rise, and if there was a shopping list, she’d drive the car here and there to fetch the indulgences he requested, mostly exorbitantly priced Scotch and gastronomical items from gourmet stores and/or carry-out from high-end restaurants. Slabs of goose liver the size of birthday-cake slices, veal porterhouse steaks, pressed duck, oolong tea-poached Chilean sea bass, jars of truffles the size of meatballs, and the like. Once she’d brought back a steamed 12-pound lobster (12 pounds!), and once a $500 sashimi platter. And, every week, there was always the regular pickup of the aforementioned Louis XIII brandy.

  During the first month of her service, she’d scarcely seen him. On rare occasions, he’d emerge from his room, take a book off the shelves, and return. Weekly, he’d leave a bag of laundry out for her to take to the cleaners. Obviously, he paid all the bills online. Thus far, all of his mail had been junk mail. She’d bring it in, leave it on the counter as directed, and while she slept, he’d come out, look it over and then transfer it at once into the garbage. Once a week a woman came and mowed the grass, and, odd as ever, another woman came every day to push a fertilizer spreader around the house. The lawn woman, named Judith, was in her early 30s, robustly figured without being fat, and had longish brunet hair turned to blond by the sun. “Oh, hi. You must be the new night-sitter.” “Yes, Jessica,” Jessica said. Judith was more tom-boyish than feminine, and generated something of a slutty cast: short jeans shorts and a baggy open necked t-shirt draped over massive breasts which the Florida sun heat immediately slicked with sweat, effecting quite a “wet T-shirt show,” for Judith never wore a bra. She was very much inclined for conversation, revealing that Mr. Roulet was “the best gig I’ve ever had, five hundred bucks a week he PayPals me, just to cut this postage stamp yard. I told him that I’d trim all the bushes and palm trees too for no extra cost but he doesn’t want me too. No fertilizer, no sprinklers, nothing, that’s why most of the yard is burnt. It’s almost like he wants the place to look like shit.” The same notion had occurred to Jessica more than once: a well-manicured and well-landscaped yard suggest affluence but what burglar would be interested in a house that looked like this? Jessica did not have lesbian proclivities but found it impossible not to look at Judith’s prodigious breasts, to which the sweat-drenched t-shirt clung like wet tissue paper. She asked, a bit impudently, “Has he ever hit on you?” “Don’t I wish!” Judith laughed. “The hot weather isn’t the only reason I wear this get-up. I’m no whore, but a guy that rich? I’d be spread-eagled on his floor in a blink.” “He’s never propositioned me,” Jessica said, “but if he did…hell, a girl’s gotta do what she’s gotta do.” “I hear that. He’s got little cameras outside, everywhere. Did you know that?” “I figured as much,” Jessica replied. “Told me he’s got them inside too.” Judith’s breasts joggled once when she huffed a laugh: “If he wants eye candy, I’ll give him all he wants. To keep this gig? Shit. It takes fifteen minutes to mow this little yard but I always take an hour, no matter how hot it is. Whenever I’m done, I take my shirt off in the backyard and hose off. I’m pretty sure he’s watching. Probably beats off, hope he does.”

  Evidently there was a sexual side to the thus far non-sexual Mr. Roulet, an interesting disclosure.

  Far more interesting, though, were the disclosures of Sharron, the “fertilizer girl.” Sharron was healthily slim, small perky breasts, an hour-glass figure, and legs that any man would holler over. She too wore very short shorts, and always a minuscule bikini top while working, which she always removed when pushing her Scott’s spreader around the fenced backyard—so, she had obviously come to the same conclusion as Judith: that Mr. Roulet was a voyeur, and Sharron had no hesitancy about emboldening her job security by practicing upon that conclusion. “But why do you only spread fertilizer around the foundation of the house?” Jessica asked. “Why not the entire yard?”

  “It’s not fertilizer,” she said. “It’s salt.”

  “Salt?”

  “Mr. Roulet says that slugs infest the house if salt isn’t put down every day. I’ve never seen any but so what? I’m not about to tell him there are far better ways to keep slugs off. For $500 a day, seven days a week? I’ll do cartwheels in the yard dressed like Batman while whistling Dixie if he wants.”

  So it seemed that Sharron made more money for less time than anyone—a dream job, and for something he could get neighborhood kid to do for five bucks.

  “Have you met the maids yet?”

  “Maids? No,” Jessica said, “but I sleep during the day so they may have come then.”

  “Once a week three chicks from MAIDS R US come here and clean the kitchen, bathroom, and living room. All buck naked.”

  “Wow.”

  So much for speculation about voyeurism.

  “But he doesn’t even watch them,” Sharron went on. “Stays in his room the whole time.”

  “Probably watches on cameras. He must be bashful”

  “Whatever. All I know is he saved my ass. I was practically homeless, living with scumbags and dope-slingers; my life was a pile of shit. But now? I got a nice new car, a great place to live, and a bunch of cash in the bank. Honestly, if that man pulled his cock out in front of me, I’d ask no questions, I’d just get on my knees and blow him.”

  “Me, too,” Jessica knew. “Business is business.” Perhaps this was a universal perspective, today and for all of human history. The Powers That Be in this world considered average people to be “the little people,” and it was hard to make ends meet, doubly so for women. The conting
ent of society that label such activities as immoral were the “haves,” not the “have nots.” Every night Jessica did not have to sleep under a bridge was proof of initiative and resolve.

  The last datum Sharron revealed was the manner by which she first came in contact with Mr. Roulet: web-camming.

  Smooth sailing ensued for the first month of her employ. She sat up nights, spent time on the internet investigating various online courses she might want to take and school applications. She bid a hearty good-riddance to her web-cam account. She watched movies, and she started a mild regimen of exercise: sit-ups, push-ups, etc. She often spent her entire shift nude or just in panties. In the event that Mr. Roulet was observing her, she wanted to make damn sure he was satisfied with what he saw. Several times a week, she’d masturbate on the couch in the middle of the night, and would bring herself to genuine orgasm, not the kind she’d faked so often on the web-cam.

  In that first month, she’d seen Mr. Roulet three times, for less than five minutes per appearance. And in that same month, Jessica had experienced absolutely nothing that might be considered “untoward.” No odd noises, no disturbances of any kind, and no evidence of prowlers.

  ««—»»

  It was a Thursday morning, an hour after sun-rise, when Dawn concluded her shift, ate a bowl of cereal, watched ten minutes of local news, then went outside and put the garbage and recycle bin out by the curb. She spared a chuckle at the copious number of expensive Scotch bottles in the bin, then she spared a moment to notice the swath of salt that ran along the foundations of the house, shaking her head. She went back into the house.

  No errands awaited her on the list; so she could either relax, go for a drive, whatever. She decided to go to the beach for a little while, before going to bed at noon. This had all the making of a nice, quiet, laid-back day.