The Book of a Thousand Sins

by Wrath James White

  In the center of that bustling crowd of nine-to-fivers, rushing to scarf down their greasy, fat laden, fast food lunches before their breaks ended, I stood struck dumb by the force of my own skepticism. Suddenly, their every ridiculous movement became an intolerable affront to all that was reasonable.

  “How could they continue that useless to and fro, that incessant struggle to acquire the commodities of this absurd existence?”

  I could not find a reasonable argument for drawing the next breath and had it not been an automatic function I would surely have died of asphyxiation right there. It seemed that all man’s endeavors led to the same end, annihilation so why should I do anything when the man who conquers the world suffers the same reward as the man who shuts himself away in his apartment and spends everyday in front of the television? When no matter what glorious chapters you write in the book of life, death existed as the period at the end of the sentence that not only concludes but erases all that has proceeded it? When your computer has no save button and the minute you cease your input, life will pull the plug and all your input will be deleted?

  I felt the panic growing as the man asked me again:

  “Donation to save the Liberty Bell?”

  “Why the hell would I want to save the damned Liberty Bell?!” It made absolutely no sense to me. It was one of those things we did because we felt we ought to. I could barely find a reason to save myself. And in that brief moment of lucidity “Why?” became “Why not?”

  The violent impulses that came boiling out of me were so contrary to everything I’d ever permitted myself to feel before. The sudden debilitating existential malaise that his ridiculous little question had sucked me down into gave rise to a misanthropic nihilism, a hatred for all things that lived and breathed under the same absurd dichotomy. Fighting so dearly to hold on to a life that is inevitably forfeit. I wanted to wake them all up. This little moron with his pamphlets and fliers would be my first convert.

  I was striking him before I’d even decided to do so. My fist collided with his jaw with a wet meaty “Smack!” and his knees wobbled but he did not fall. Disappointed but excited I threw a left hook to his temple that made his eyes dance in his skull like pinballs. He hit the concrete so hard his skull cracked and blood sprayed from the wound like a fountain. Everyone tried their best not to notice as I dragged him into an alley. When I started to rip off his clothes there were a few mild protests but no one was willing to get involved enough to try and stop me and risk being late to work. I heard a few cell phones chime out the numbers 911 and urgent whispers try to describe what I was doing to the unconscious activist while trying to remember what street they were on.

  I jerked off his underwear, ripping them in two and stared at his dimpled ass cheeks. Then I grabbed them and spread them wide revealing his puckered anus. There was nothing particularly attractive about it. Still, I felt myself growing hard, urgently aroused by the exotic prospect of doing the taboo right out there in the open in front of a gaggle of awestruck witnesses. Besides, I’d entered far less attractive orifices for the purpose of pleasure than this one. True, they’d all been female, and this was a step in an entirely different direction, but the little guy had a point with his moronic little slogans. “I fuck to cum not to conceive.” So what did it matter if I fucked a girl or this little geek? I mean, why not?

  I whipped out my cock and slathered it with saliva, then I spit on my thumb and slid it into the little guy’s asshole. He was starting to regain consciousness and he winced at the intrusion. I withdrew my thumb, aimed my cock between his cheeks and prepared to ram it home as the crowd alternately cheered me on and condemned me. He woke up with a shriek just as the tip of my cock stretched his lower intestines.

  His frantic struggle to escape, his screams and tears got me so hot that I shot my wad almost instantly. I could hear the sirens getting closer and I had my pants up and was sprinting through the alley hopping fences and leaving the little PC geek far behind before the first cop entered the alley.

  ***

  I stopped to take a piss. Taking my cue from the cynics of old, who so shunned social mores that they were known to defecate in public, I dropped my pants in the middle of the street and relieved my bowels from both ends. Finding no reason not to, I left my pants and underwear there in the street as I walked away. The occasional cool breeze in this otherwise humid day tickled my testicles and put steel back in my erection. I walked down the street with it swaying in the breeze and drawing gasps of astonishment and scowls of revulsion. I watched with amusement as old ladies and young girls chided and cursed me or giggled and snickered as I walked past, offended or embarrassed by my brazen nudity.

  I followed a young housewife all the way from the market, masturbating to the subtle bounce and sway of her voluptuous ass. Imagining ramming my swollen organ between those salacious buttocks as I feverishly stroked myself. Luckily for her, I reached orgasm before she made it to her house. I would be back for her though.

  It was nearly dusk when I dragged myself home and lay down to rest. My mind was still mulling over all the beliefs and convictions that had so long fettered it and how endless the possibilities might be for me not that I was free of these restraints. I wondered if I could fly.

  Now you will really think me mad but I sat there for hours dissecting all the reasons that kept me rooted to the earth and I found not one that seemed so terribly binding now. So I catalogued each argument against self-propelled flight one by one and tore those arguments to shreds. The first was my obvious lack of aerodynamics. But as Descartes had pointed out centuries before, all of my senses had been fooled before. I had seen things that appeared small from a distance that when viewed closer were obviously huge. I had thought I saw one person who turned out to be another. Had even seen things out of the corner of my eyes that were not there. I had thought I heard voices when no words were spoken. Even confused one smell for another. And how many times, in a state of dreaming, had I imagined sensations that had no external cause but yet radiated through my entire being as if I was truly falling, or taking punches, or getting a blow job from Madonna, or flying? All of my senses were open to the interpretation of my mind, which was not flawless. And according to my new way of thinking if it could be doubted, it was not certain, therefore not ultimately true. The entire shape of my body was open to debate. In fact the very existence of my body was debatable.

  My mind could so expertly mimic external sensation as to trick me into believing I was having sex, even bringing me to the point of orgasm. So why would it be so far fetched as to imagine that all external and internal sensations were the product of the human mind and that no physical body truly existed? If I could fly in my dreams then why not while awake? And with that I left my body behind and was soaring.

  I know I’m oversimplifying things. It wasn’t just as simple as a thought becoming reality but then again it was. But first I had to convince myself of it completely. Still, after so recently convincing myself that there was no difference between the silky wet heaven between a woman’s thigh’s and the saggy, hairy, pimpled ass of a man, it was not as hard a task as you might imagine.

  It wasn’t like you read about in books. It wasn’t levitation or astral projection. My body simply ceased to be. It became “spirit” for lack of a better word. My flesh atomized leaving only a disembodied consciousness adrift in the night air.

  I landed in bedrooms and took entire families as they lay sleeping. I assaulted women in their apartments behind doors they believed were safely locked and secured. My world. My dream. And my will, I soon found, was nearly omnipotent.

  Once I found out I could do that, well, the rampage began. See I ceased to believe in the existence of other consciousnesses. I ceased to believe that there was anything outside my own consciousness. I began testing a theory that everything in the world was a fabrication of my own mind. That everything existed only because I believed it did.

  I tried it on things first. Making objects disappea
r. Mostly stoplights and street signs. Then I tried it on people. I made newscaster disappear off the television. I made police officers disappear off the corner. I changed fat girls into skinny girls, made flat-chested women voluptuous, and even added another six inches to my own cock. I turned my Honda into a Lexus and my apartment into a castle.

  I can tell that I’m losing you but listen. If everything is just a dream and you suddenly realize it, if you are suddenly awake within the dream. There would be nothing that you couldn’t do. And I was awake. I brought your ass into this cell didn’t I?

  The more convinced I became that I was the only consciousness in existence, The more havoc I wreaked. See, if everything is a dream then what reason would I have to respect the rights of these fantasy creatures? Why shouldn’t I simply use them as I see fit and discard them when I grow bored with them like broken toys? That’s when the rapes started. See, that little activist guy was all right, but I wanted more and better. So I started taking women and men anywhere and everywhere.

  My little rape/murder spree baffled the police because there was no profile to my victims. I took them young, old, fat, skinny, white, black, male, female, attractive, or grotesquely ugly. See, I had the ability to make them into anything I wanted. By the time my hands closed around their throats, they all looked like Jessica Rabbit.

  I raped a woman at the laundromat while waiting for my clothes to dry. I raped one in the dressing room at the mall. I made a mess of her. She’s the first one that I cannibalized. If you see her, tell her I’m sorry. But you have no idea how sweet a woman’s breasts taste or the tender flesh of her buttocks. To me everything tasted like pastry. I shouldn’t have left her alive though. But I wasn’t really concerned with what life would be like for her absent her breasts and much of her ass. She didn’t really exist anyway. None of them did.

  I started murdering not to cover my tracks or spare them from life as hideous mutilated freaks as some have suggested but because I wanted to see what else I could do with my new freedom. I fucked them alive. I fucked their corpses. I fucked them while they screamed and writhed in their death throes. Just to see what it felt like. Just to see what sex was like stripped of all moral restraints. I fucked mothers and daughters, sons and fathers. I ate them alive while thrusting my swollen cock into orifices I’d cut or chewed into them. I carved them up and made sculptures out of their flesh. I crawled inside their skin and tried to become them. I tried to marry their flesh with my own and share the experience of their pain and my own pleasure as one delirious sensation. I did it because I could; because it was my dream and I was the only thing in it that was real. I scoured humanity to find one other person that could resist my will leaving the carnage of my failed experiments in my wake.

  See, I was getting lonely. If my consciousness alone existed in a vast vacuum filled only with phantasmagorical constructs plucked from my own imagination, then life was even more absurd than I had first supposed. I was killing in order to find someone who I could not kill. In the kingdom of the blind the one eyed man is not only king he is a species apart. If I was awake and conscious surely there must be others? But murder after murder, rape after rape, confirmed my isolation. I was soon convinced that there was no one else like me in the whole world; that there was no one but me in the whole world.

  That’s why I was so surprised when that detective stepped right into the middle of my dream.

  I watched the news with the same skepticism with which I watched the screams of my victims. I knew that it was all in my head. So when I kept hearing stories about this square jawed, broad shouldered, leading man type Lead Detective who’d been assigned to the case, closing in on the “Werewolf of Main Street” as the press had dubbed me, I paid it hardly any attention at all. His name was John Malice and he looked so much like a comic book or action movie hero that I immediately dismissed him as an errant fantasy; a figment of my imagination. I thought it was just my mind trying to find a new way to keep me amused. See, even in my new state of lucidity it was easy to slip back into the habitual dream-state in which the rest of humanity walked. It required constant vigilance to remember that it was all bullshit. So I didn’t trip when I saw the police canvassing the neighborhood with my picture. I turned them into birds and monkeys. And watched them flutter and scamper madly from house to house. When Detective Malice knocked on my door I tried to wipe him out entirely, imagining empty space where he once stood. But the knocking persisted. This illusion had more substance than the rest and required a more direct approach. I grabbed the Boy Scout hatchet I’d used on the old lady at the 7-Eleven whose murder the detective was no doubt investigating. I opened the door and tried to drive it straight through his skull. I was damned surprised when the bullets slammed into my chest. I willed the guns to turn to roses but still the bullets came, flying faster than I could see.

  The only thing that made sense was that somehow I had encountered another consciousness. Detective John Malice must have been a real person rather than another dream created in my mind. There went the entire theory of monotheism.

  ***

  I rambled on for the better part of an hour before finally allowing the reporter to speak. I knew what he wanted to ask. Naturally all his responses where predictable.

  “So what about me?”

  “You mean are you real? Are you a figment of my imagination?” I smirked at him. I knew that I was about to rock his whole fucking world!

  “You are what I make you.” My smile broadened. I didn’t know why these types of tricks still amused me. Perhaps it was because I had discovered that my dream people seemed to have autonomous wills and self-awareness. They believed themselves to be alive. I got a kick out of showing them the face of their creator. I loved the look in their eyes when they realized that the author of their existence was this innocuous looking “Joe Average” type guy who they would never have looked twice at if he hadn’t been convicted of killing thirty or forty people.

  He knew I was about to do something terrible to him. He started trying to scream again, so once again I took away his larynx. He knew that I could do anything I wanted to him, just as earlier I had reached out with my mind and made his flesh run like syrup. A liquid that dripped from his stool, onto the floor, and then right into the cell with me. I now began twisting and reshaping his meat and bones like clay as he struggled to scream.

  I reassembled him (minus vocal chords) and watched as his eyes bulged with fear and he turned to bang on the locked cell door, realizing at last what all the rest had finally figured out just before they died, that everything I’d said was true.

  I began slowly pulling him apart. When I was done I put him back together and then ripped him apart again. This time I allowed him to scream. His shrill cries of agony filled the isolation ward. I could hear the other inmates weeping in their cells. They knew what he was going through.

  He collapsed into a fit of blubbering tears as he realized that the guards were not coming to help him. They would not come unless I wanted them to. I raped and mutilated him a dozen times as the day passed into night, stopping to put his mind back together nearly as often as I had to reassemble his flesh. When I grew tired of hearing him scream I silenced him once again. I was almost done with him and there were no more tapes for the recorder. There was enough on there now to keep the world guessing for several centuries.

  The reporter was still whimpering and crying in silence as I pulled his intestines out through his asshole. He mouthed an exclamation that appeared to be the word “God!” I smiled, considering that an acknowledgement that he’d finally realized just whom he was dealing with.

  A Friend In Need

  The ground shook as something immense galloped through the darkness, rustling the bushes and knocking over trashcans. Car alarms went off as it passed and dogs yelped and growled, straining on their leashes to attack the gigantic beast they could sense but not see. Walker gasped and picked up his pace. He was almost running when he crossed Germantown Avenue. He turned
and looked behind him in time to see a large hairy bear-like shape lumber out of the shadows and run in a loping gait between streetlights. Sharp fangs caught the moonlight and gleamed yellow and fearsome. Walker’s heart thundered in his chest.

  “My God! What the hell is that thing?”

  Whatever it was it had slipped back into the shadows, yet it was still coming, steadily gaining on him. He could hear heavy footsteps behind him in the darkness. Hot, raspy panting breaths steamed on the back of his neck raising the hairs along his spine. It was that close. So close that if he stopped for a second it would overcome him. Still, he had no idea what it was, why it was after him, or what it would do to him if it caught him.

  Rumbling grunts and growls weakened his knees with fear. The creature’s murderous hunger was evident in its voice and its breath that stank of fetid meat and blood. Walker picked up his pace, resisting the urge to break out in an all-out sprint as the thing struggled to keep up with him, to overtake him. Repeatedly casting nervous glances over his shoulder he hugged the bleeding abdominal wound where the thing had already attacked him, holding his intestines in place as he jogged down the street trailing blood. Every shadow seemed pregnant with menace. A violent death seemed to wait for him in every darkened corner. The night was charged with a palpable hostility. He turned onto Duval Street and started back into his old neighborhood. It looked far worse than he remembered it.

  The streets were forbiddingly dark and desolate. Tenebrous shadows knitted together into solid walls of night that stretched down the gloomy streets for block after block. The entire neighborhood appeared to be one great desert of midnight, inhabited only by decaying brick and stucco buildings and the rusting husks of late model cars. Walker wasn’t fooled though. He could hear furtive whispers coming from the alleyways and see the dim flicker of disposable lighters as crack fiends and hypes lit their pipes and heated their spoons amid the shadows. Off in the distance gunshots rang out and rap music blared from a car stereo passing by a block or two over. He could hear heated arguments coming from behind the walls of one of the dilapidated, pre-Civil War row homes lining the somber street, followed by the smack and thud of bare knuckles striking bare flesh and heartbroken tears. From other houses he heard the gruff panting and low sultry moaning of entwined impassioned lovers. The eerie blue flicker of television sets, left on long after their owners had fallen asleep, cast odd shadows behind darkened windows along with the canned laughter of late-night sitcoms. The night seethed with unseen life.