The Edge Of Honor (Part One)
Page 2
SIDNEY
Romans 7:14: The law is good, then. The trouble is not with the law but with me, because I am sold into slavery, with sin as my master.
The monster in Sidney Matthews’ closet was real.
Night after night, as he tried so desperately to sink into sleep, terror ran through his thin, child’s body.
How many nights had he lain in horror and shame waiting for his mother to come to his bed? A hundred? A thousand? She came, but not as a mother. Mothers read you quietly lulling bedtime stories, tucked you in, kissed you on the forehead and turned out the light.
Not Sidney’s mother. No, Sidney’s mother came to him on whispering heels in the dark of night, long after the house was quiet, long past his bedtime, long after his father had closed his door with a promise of sweet dreams to come.
Sidney never had sweet dreams. Sidney had nightmares of a devil-woman with maleficent blonde hair, despicably naked under a blue peignoir, and instead of a children’s story, she came armed with the Word of God.
Blood is life.
The first lash of the belt seared into his skin.
Blood is atonement.
More pain. Again and again. Over and over. When he screamed, she beat him harder. When he cried, she called him names. When he begged, she punished him longer. Sometimes he wondered if she was going to kill him. Most of the time he wished she would.
The nightmares always ended the same way. With the unthinkable. The unspeakable. The reprehensible.
His mother would strip, run her breasts across the abased welts, kiss him. Tell him what a good, good boy he was. And then she’d take him into her mouth and shame him even more.
Night after night, the monster came, stealing the illusory protection of childhood away from him.
Oh yes, the monster in Sidney’s closet was real.
Sidney bought his first computer on his fifteenth birthday. By the time he was seventeen he owned two more, and could hack into almost any system in the world. He wrote his own programs, blazed through firewalls, strolled through doors that were closed to millions, coded his own execution commands into the intercellular matrix of the Pentagon, and dreamed about ruling the galaxy.
He was a wizard. A sorcerer of magic.
A God.
He could render an entire operating system useless with the stroke of a key, a wave of a wand.
He could also end a life.
Diane Waltham’s father should never have told him to get lost. Shouldn’t have sneered at him or looked at him like he was less than zero, a non-person who’d never be good enough to date his precious daughter. Like he was a bug on the bottom of Waltham’s shiny black loafer.
Fuck that.
He was God.
A week later Sidney proved it.
First he deleted old man Waltham’s bank account. Twenty thousand in savings, poof, gone. Twelve hundred in checking, nope, not anymore. Credit cards? Maxed out and over ninety days late. Mortgage payment? Five months behind. Foreclosure imminent. And that nice cushy accounting job? Well, bummer for him when a sudden audit showed that the asshole had been skimming into an offshore bank account.
Boo-hoo, mother fucker. Life over.
Sidney’s eighteenth birthday was only three weeks away, he was almost a man, and inside he harbored a man’s rage. A rage contained, suppressed for nearly a lifetime. His preacher father was a pussy, his mother a whore.
She came to him as she always did, smelling of roses, nearly nude, with a bible in one hand and a belt in the other. On this night, however, things would be different.
Blood is life.
The first lash of the belt never touched his skin.
He became tall. He became real. He became the son of his mother.
He loosed his rage, setting it upon the woman he’d once loved. The woman he now despised.
He bashed her skull in with a hammer until her brains spilled onto the floor, and as he watched her bleed, still reeling in the spiral of rage, he got his first legitimate erection.
As he picked up the bible and started reading, he stroked himself.
Blood is atonement.
The monster in the closet was dead.
Sidney never went to prison for killing his mother. Instead, he spent three years in a state mental hospital pumped full of Thorazine. Within the first six months, he became poor, sad Sidney whose mother had hideously abused him and, holy Jesus, who wouldn’t crack, even kill, under that kind of mistreatment. So poor, sad Sidney with the Thorazine shuffle, behaved, learned, and played the system.
The system was easy. Passing his meds off was even easier.
His favorite place within the cold, sterile, keep-the-psychos-calm yellow walls, became the library. The old saying about knowledge being power became his salvation. And glory be, the patients’ library even had a computer they let poor, sad Sidney use. After all, what harm could a chemically lobotomized man do?
If they only knew. By the second year of his stay, Sidney was spending most of his time writing codes again, hacking, becoming stronger and smarter, until one day he simply ceased to exist.
On a cloudless summer day, Sidney Matthews shuffled off the hospital grounds, and yes, the staff may have known him, but without records of his birth, his life, his stay, he simply disappeared off the face of the earth, never to be seen again.