Tom´s Story

by Claudio Hernández

  Tom´s Story

  Claudio Hernández

  Translated by Alejandra Mendoza Zacarías

  “Tom´s Story”

  Written By Claudio Hernández

  Copyright © 2017 Claudio Hernández

  All rights reserved

  Distributed by Babelcube, Inc.

  www.babelcube.com

  Translated by Alejandra Mendoza Zacarías

  Cover Design © 2017 Iván Ruso

  “Babelcube Books” and “Babelcube” are trademarks of Babelcube Inc.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Tom´s Story | Claudio Hernández

  Prologue | The human brain is the most complex object-organ that exists. It is able to develop several personalities at the same time, create body mutations, or decide when it will die. No psychiatrist has managed to control the array of personality disorders that exist currently and that they claim to know. And what about those unknown? Faith and madness are just two things that can exist inside the brain and manifest in an obsessive way. This is Tom's story, someone capable of showing multiple personalities and different identities, besides his slight mental retardation.

  Preface

  The beginning | Charlie

  Epilogue

  Synopsis of The Beginnings of Stephen King

  Synopsis of Stephen King's Box.

  Synopsis of Infected, The City of Zol

  Author’s Biography

  Your Review and Word-of-Mouth Recommendations Will Make a Difference

  Are You Looking For Other Great Reads?

  Tom´s Story

  Claudio Hernández

  First eBook edition: March, 2017.

  Title: Tom´s Story

  © 2017 Claudio Hernández.

  © 2017 Cover design: Iván Ruso

  © 2017 Translation: Alejandra Mendoza Zacarías

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication, including cover design, may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means or in any media, either electronic, chemical, mechanical, optical, recording, Internet, or photocopy, without previous permission from the publisher or author. All rights reserved

  This book is dedicated to my mother-in-law Carmen, who fortunately still lives after the unannounced loss of my father-in-law. They have been and will be my parents for life, even after death that is so present in all of us.

  Prologue

  The human brain is the most complex object-organ that exists. It is able to develop several personalities at the same time, create body mutations, or decide when it will die. No psychiatrist has managed to control the array of personality disorders that exist currently and that they claim to know. And what about those unknown? Faith and madness are just two things that can exist inside the brain and manifest in an obsessive way. This is Tom's story, someone capable of showing multiple personalities and different identities, besides his slight mental retardation.

  Preface

  Letter written by Amelia to Tom Lee Rush, never received by him, of course, dated August 13, 1984, and found still on his grave. The letter read:

  It is a splendid morning, and the sun has been shining the same for two months. I love summer because you can wear a simple short skirt and a low cut sweater... But I'm not writing to tell you about that. Not even to talk to you, Tom, for two reasons.

  One, you cannot read very well or fast.

  Two, you are no longer with us.

  In a way, this letter is addressed to all of them. It is addressed to everyone who has your vague and dark image in their minds, to those who turn their heads as they pass by what used to be your sweet little house, to those who point at your grave with trembling fingers and smile as they depart from it. To all of them. And those who were absent that night.

  In a way, everyone is partly guilty.

  That is why I wrote this letter and left it on your grave, dug by a trembling old fool who did not stop spitting phlegm as he buried you. I was there to see that disgusting act, you know. I was by your side all the time, despite the fact that in the last year I did not visit you. Now I regret it. But your bitch mother would not let me walk past the doorway of your house.

  However, you know I wrote to you through the screen of your computer. Do you remember? You could draw stuff on the screen. They were beautiful at first, but they slowly degraded to terrifying things. You must have had a hard time lately, and I did not understand anything that was actually happening to you.

  I also remember the long talks on the phone.

  Road House is a small town, and as such, any strange happening spreads like wildfire, especially if it is bad news. You have always been a headline, and they still talk about you, a month after your departure.

  To that imbecile who takes this letter, I will tell them that...

  It seems like it was yesterday when everything happened, but it was a month ago. I still have his image fresh in my mind. Sometimes I think I see him among shadows in the darkness of my room, at night, moving and approaching me.

  Tom Lee Rush had no friends, and he was barely out on the street, so they hardly knew him well enough to judge him as they do now. Did he barely go out? Well, I have to say that he went out some nights, but I do not know for what purpose. That is the truth, and they would come back to him. Maybe he brought them, I do not know, but that does not matter now.

  My beloved cousin suffered a slight mental retardation, which was unfortunately brought by fucking meningitis when he was barely one year old. Had it not been so, my cousin would now be alive and like everybody else. This slight mental retardation gradually led him to degradation and death. I would almost say it was a not deserved and too premature death. However, it was not the slight mental retardation that took him to the grave. Everything has to be clarified.

  He had several mental disorders, I have to admit it, and he was able to show multiple personalities and identities. He even became delirious like a genius, and you did not notice his, let's say, slight mental retardation. His psychiatrist mentioned the different identities part, I do not know what that is. I never noticed anything. Tom did not tell me about it either. Maybe he did not know it himself. Well, I contradict myself. He did tell me things that he remembered and that were different to him. But they were vague stuff, fleeting memories that could have been the result of his imagination. Was Tom right and I never really believed him?

  But I have to say that Tom Lee Rush was not bad. He was just a mentally retarded man who had not been loved by his parents. He was only someone who, because of his condition, could not tell good from bad. But that is justifiable. Then, there was that goddamn identity disorder. I've said it again...

  Tom got worse and quickly degraded like a rotten apple since his fucking mother started suffering anxiety attacks and especially when... self-important Samantha moved to live next to my cousin. She made it worse, oh she did it. And they were also there.

  But she was a stupid seductress.

  Now she is alive, and Tom is dead. That slut is free, and Tom is under ground. I do not know where the others are. I do not believe anything from the police file. Although now that I think about it, that does not matter now. Maybe I'm like him at some points in my life. Maybe.

  But you know something, buddy?

  I still think Tom will make you pay for what you did, even from his grave. And they, well, again I mean them, in that aspect I suppose he did what he had to do and that's it.

  I am not crazy.

  I just loved my cousin madly and wanted to be part of his extraordinary ability.

  Also, I refuse to think he's dead.

  I still hope that someday I'll see him walking alone on the street or with someone, who knows.

 
And I do not care what you think, buddy. But I have had enough of you pointing at Tom's grave with a hysterical smile on your lips.

  Besides... What morbid curiosity made you take this letter?

  If you're from the police, I want you to know that you're a bunch of useless idiots. You always arrive when everything is over. Psychiatrists did not help him, either. Mental disorders, multiple personalities... Is that wrong? Maybe it is, but that does not matter now.

  And one more thing...

  Last night, I heard Tom crying and begging for forgiveness.

  Oh! And leave this note on his grave, motherfucker.

  Amelia

  August 13, 1984

  The beginning

  Charlie

  He had been diagnosed several personality disorders by his psychiatrist, including adopting multiple personalities, as well as different identities. The latter was a disease that created mental splits in people suffering from dissociative identity disorder .He also suffered from a slight mental retardation produced by a deadly disease. His mother said that he was possessed by the devil himself and prayed for hours in front of a gigantic Christ who always looked down at the ground with his eyes were closed, miserable and in pain, a position he adopted when he was carved in wood. Meanwhile, Tom Lee Rush took a bucket of pills of all colors every day, especially Sedum, and charged a small state pension for his permanent disability, but he kept turning and seeing them.

  The house next door, inhabited by several new neighbors who always disappeared, was empty most of the time. Now was the time to have another guest, and Tom was waiting for it anxiously as his nose, glued to the glass of his window, dripped snot that slid down the glass into small, opaque rivers. His large hands were resting on the window frame, palms open, and his eyes were barely visible from the outside because of the huge amount of dirt on the glass.

  He kept seeing them through the window. Dozens of arms got in through it when it was burst open by the wind. These arms were purplish-red flaps of even darker skin that fell to the floor of his room. These hands slapped the emptiness while he watched them with one of his many personalities, the one of a terrified child in front of a rabid dog with foam coming out from both sides of its open snout. And then he changed his mind. He simply became a madman who tried to kill himself by blowing up the house with dynamite in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other, next to his mother. And it was like this over and over again. Always the same cycle. And they came and went, and then they were there.

  Tom Lee Rush was sick.

  1

  Tom Lee Rush is a retard and eats shit...

  A hand-carved inscription on one of the wooden benches in the park in front of his house said that and worse things.

  "Buh... before one hundred... one hundred and one, the... there's ni... ninety-five!" Tom Lee Rush whispered under his breath, his nose crushed against the window pane in his room that faced the sunny street. Not hung from one of the nostrils in his huge nose. Both hands were leaning against the glass, and his fingers, smeared with snot, sketched strange sticky shapes on the glass.

  Outside, the sun was splendid, and children not older than ten years old accompanied by their respective mums swung in the park that Tom would not step on, at least during the day. He only went there at night, when there was nobody and, of course, when momma slept, inebriated.

  And the park was empty when everything happened.

  He also did other things when he went out.

  Tom managed to escape some other night to go look for a cat and nail it on a neighbor's door. That was the worst thing he could do so far under one of his personalities. It was the identity of a thirteen year old child; then he returned to be eighteen year old Tom.

  The children swung with big smiles drawn on their faces, and one of the mums pointed at Tom's house. Then she turned and smiled widely at her friend.

  Tom Lee Rush was a mentally retarded man, so his unwanted condition prevented him from doing certain things—or maybe it did not. But that did not make him a bad and evil person—or maybe it did. It simply made him someone who had not been able to develop his intellectual capacity as normally as others. Until he was transformed. Until he adopted a new identity. One of them made him a cold, intelligent, and psychopathic being.

  His psychiatrist had diagnosed several personality disorders and a slight mental retardation that was not related, but he noticed that sometimes he changed his identity. Unless when Tom spoke without stammering at the age of fifteen on a cold winter morning, it was a product of the psychiatrist's imagination. It was hard for Tom to speak clearly. This was another sequel he suffered since it happened until he changed personality or, rather, identity.

  When he was just a year old, Tom suffered from meningitis, the cause of his current state, at least partially. The disease added a slight mental retardation to the complex personality that he was born with. Road House had a minor surgeries clinic, but for bigger problems you had to travel to Portland if you wanted to get it right. By the time Tom was admitted to the Portland hospital, it was too late. He paced the hospital's long corridors already in a coma. Thank God he woke up a week later, but he was not the same. He had already adopted new identities. Or was that triggered by meningitis? Probably not, only age activated it.

  After a long recovery, Tom returned home with mom and dad. A year later, dad left this fucking world by cancer. So Tom did not know, oblivious to death, and mom started to realize she needed to drink. The following years were an ordeal. They lived from the money that her husband had left her and from the little amount she could earn by cleaning some houses and the school. But lately she had devoted herself completely to drinking and had become an authentic alcoholic, already subject of cold and undermining looks. She took refuge in alcohol and Faith in Christ.

  The glorious days were over, and Tom did not make progress, or at least it was not noticeable for his mom, and lately not for his psychiatrist.

  Tom Lee Rush was now an eighteen-year-old, full grown man who had not had an orgasm yet. Maybe he was slightly obese for his age, actually too obese. Was there an age to classify obesity? When he climbed the bathroom scale, which he often did without knowing what that needle was doing, moving wildly behind a tiny glass, the needle moved to 264 pounds. Tom smiled, getting off the scale and climbing up again to see the needle going crazy down there.

  A pair of dark eyes hid behind thick glasses with premeditated mixed enthusiasm and horror. Thick, bone-rimmed glasses, with one of the rods repaired with an old tape.

  Lately, his vision had also gotten much worse, and it had been detected at the late age of eleven, because mom noticed that he stumbled over things very often. His hair was smooth and brushed back neatly, crushed by a dense gummy layer that shone over his red hair, like a bunch of roasted corn. His rosy, acne-covered cheeks flushed easily when he tried to laugh, and his chubby knuckles turned into big white spots as he clenched his fist. He was slow and awkward, but nice. He spent most of the time sedated thanks to pills called Sedum. They turned him into a gentle being, yet occasionally he burst into a breakdown, which his mom started having lately, too.

  Momma was tall and thin, terribly bony. Her name was Stella. In her forgotten past, she had been a sweet, rosy, slender figure. Now she was a haggard alcoholic with large, venous knuckles and a mat of disheveled gray hair over her head. Her cold, angry look showed the effects of alcohol and sedative pills. She wore a long, dark dress (which made her look like a magpie) that was beginning to undo, since it was so old. And when that happened, she would not sew it or take it off to wash it. She was a complete hog. Gray sneakers wrapped around her swollen feet, and climbing up her leg, you could see a tangle of blackened veins foreshadowing the worst.

  Tom did not get new clothes either. He got one outfit for summer and one for winter. When he took off his clothes, he kept them in a ramshackle wooden wardrobe in which Tom used to see the owl at midnight and wake up screaming in a puddle of sweat. It was now summer, and Road House
was in luck. It was a town sitting by the sea, and the lighthouse shone in the night like a disturbingly strange firefly. Soon, tourists and those who spent the rest of the year working in the city would come.

  Then Tom would be more locked up than ever, wrapped in a T-shirt with a big drawing of Tom and Jerry and green shorts darkened by shit accumulated in the last seasons. They were still big for him, because Mom had already decided about not buying another pair in the next five years.

  In short, this was the chaotic Rush family.

  Everyone knew that at number 3 on Culver Street Vivian, the old magpie and retarded lived.

  Just next door, there was a sign "for rent" stabbed on the grass like a stake in the chest of a vampire, and behind it a sloppy garden and a beautiful house freshly painted white with a black ceiling.

  No one from the town would rent that house. However, not everyone knows their neighbors from number 3.

  "Ah... after nuh... ninety-fih... five, there's eh... eighty" and Tom burst out laughing and farting.

  2

  He counted backwards. He always did and always stammered. He was tall, over six feet tall, and he was well-built despite the morbidity. But there were exceptions, yes there were. When his identity changed, he counted from zero to one hundred without stuttering once, and his eyes flashed a frightening hatred from his big eyeballs as white and dull as milk. There was a degree of insanity within him. He was no longer Tom but Jack, and he hated men. He hated his neighbors. And he did terrible things.

  3

  Now Tom was transformed into Danny, an eight-year-old boy, weak, and cowardly-innocence .Such was his fucked up and uncontrollable personality and identity disorder.

  "Go away...Get out of huh... here! Get away from huh... here!" Tom was hysterically crouched behind the sheets, in the gloom of his room, his eyes almost out of their sockets. Get away from huh... here! Owl!"