At the other end of the house, a dim light faintly lighted the hallway between Tom's room and Mama's. His mother had set her feet on the ground excitedly, with narrow, sparkling eyes that would soon see Tom whimpering behind a bunch of sheets. She would dart at his hair like a cat and force him to swallow a Sedum without water.
When his mother came in, hair pointing all around, she saw a chunky finger pointing toward the closet.
"The uh... owl, momma!"
"You are an idiot! How many times have I told you that there's nothing in the closet, imbecile!" The hysterical mother barked as she lunged toward him with her hands outstretched and fingers wide open, hoping to grab his hair in the dimness of the room.
"Momma S...Stella" Tom mumbled before receiving the first scratch of a broken nail.
"I've told you millions of times not to call me Momma Stella, you bastard! I'm your mother!" His mother grabbed him by the hair and pulled with all her strength until she tore a red strand out of anger. She probably was not expecting to pluck any hairs, since she fell back with surprise. The blow was hollow, and an appalling pain climbed up her back.
"Mom!"
"Shut up, you idiot!" His mother yelled from the floor as she stood up, still holding the wavy strand between her fingers.
"It... it really huh... hurts."
His mother stood up, cursing, and dragged her feet to the other end of the room to turn on the light, tripping over one of Tom's shoes.
"Dammit!"
When the light overflowed in the disorderly room, Tom's hands were resting on his head, and his face was shrunk in a sudden act of pain. Surprisingly, he still had his glasses on.
"It... huh... hurts a lot."
"If you do not shut up, bastard, you'll get me more pissed off, and then you'll regret it. Do you think you frighten me with that body? You're slow and clumsy. The whole town knows you are a worthless retarded. You're just like your father. A piece of shit!" His mother had spat such speech hoping he would understand, but Tom seemed puzzled, with surprised and slightly dilated eyes, kneeling on the bed, which confirmed her assumption. "I knew you would not understand anything. You're useless."
"Huh... hurts..."
"Can you shut up?!" His mother cut him off, her neck veins swollen, making her look terrifying.
"The owl, Momma! It there." Tom pointed at the closet again with a plump finger.
Her mother turned her back to him, suddenly ignoring him completely and with a severe rictus of cynicism drawn on her lips.
"I'll give it to you now, stupid owl!" She stammered as she crept slowly down the hall. "I'll give it to you now."
"Mommaaaa!" Tom shouted incoherently from the room, but his mother had already gone downstairs and was now digging into the medicine drawer.
An eternity later, his mother again crossed the threshold of the door with a blue pill in her hand. She reached up to Tom and grabbed him by the hairs with her other hand, pulling them back strongly as her whole face crinkled in a malevolent expression.
"Take this, asshole, swallow this!" Almost in a stroke, she inserted the pill into Tom's mouth, who was pleased and at the same time surprised.
Tom closed his mouth and violently hit his head against the headboard when he tried to throw himself back in an autonomous act. The blow was thundering, and his mother let out a cynical laugh between her dry, cracked lips.
"That's good. Let's see if you kill yourself once and for all. But swallow that damn pill!"
Tom put his hand to his head for the second time, and this time his face twitched in pain. A moment later, Adam's apple rose and fell slowly in the depths of his sweating neck.
"Very well, bastard" she said with a terrifying look in her eyes.
"Owl, owl momma" Tom gestured again to the shaken cupboard, sweating copiously.
His mother tugged hard on his hair again with her deathly pale knuckles that showed deformed, wild bones.
"Idiot! There's nothing there, damn you! And stop fucking me tonight." She pulled Tom's hair with all her strength until she balanced him with all his weight. She withdrew her hand with a few more hairs hooked between her fingers and, with the open hand, gave him a smack that exploded hollow in the night.
But Tom kept pointing toward the closet while a tear slipped out of his right eye timidly, rolling slowly down his cheek invaded by youthful acne.
"Mom, the owl" his forefinger rose again and, in a finer voice but with a higher volume, he added "I'm Danny Mom!"
But momma went down the stairs again, ignoring him completely. She turned on the light in the kitchen and searched her most precious value in a cupboard. A bottle of Bourbon. She poured herself a drink and took a deep breath, her eyes shining.
"This goes for me" she gasped and sipped a sip of Bourbon that had momentarily burned down her throat, a sensation that pleased her enormously.
Fifteen minutes later Tom had literally stopped fucking her night and lay asleep pleasantly crammed into a bundle of sheets, curled up like a fetus, his finger still pointing unconsciously toward the closet.
His mother went to bed half an hour later, drunk. She forgot to turn off the kitchen light and close the bottle of Bourbon, and stumbled up the stairs.
... maybe you'll break your neck, old slut.
The stairs were not overly long and were made of walnut wood. It was a good material. But the old lady had not varnished them in years, so they looked neglected and older than they were. In addition, there was a great stain of bleach that would be a legend over time. A year ago, Stella had decided to scrub the stairs. Oh God, what a miracle! She put the bottle of blech on one of the steps; by the time, they had a cat. It was scrawny and hungry, but it was a cat after all. Stella had gone to get a glass of Bourbon and, when she returned, watched in anger as the bottle of bleach spilled down the steps. The cat, next to it, looked at her with bright and flat eyes.
One morning, the cat appeared nailed to one of the doors of the house with a huge knife stabbing it like a Moorish spike. The animal bled with wide, glassy eyes, and that expression was etched in Tom's mind, so that he repeated the feat over and over every time a cat fell in his trap. Tom then became Charlie, a thirteen-year-old teenager with frightening and evil ideas. It was another personality or identity.
Whatever the memory, Stella did not remember the stain or the fucking cat. She climbed the stairs, holding herself on the handrail. As she reached the corridor, her wimpy body slumped to the ground, banging her head slightly. It wasn't bad. It would not send her six feet under. It would not even make a wound a couple of inches long. She did not hit anything, except for the fucked floor that was carpeted to the very doors, gnawed by moths, of the respective rooms. One in front of the other as if they were looking at each other continuously with hatred. There was a third door in the middle of the hall. A door leading to a room full of rust and bad memories of her husband. Rags, dust, and cobwebs nested by huge bugs almost as big as a fist when they spread their long, black, curved legs. There was even an empty, dusty bottle of Whiskey which had lost its label over time. Of course, the door was locked.
Stella lay on the floor for a long time until sleep finally took hold of her, dragging her into endless nightmares and bad memories.
Outside, night devoured everything anxiously, and the moon was long hidden behind large, irregular clouds. While in the state of Maine darkness reigned, somewhere in the world the sun shone in all its glory.
4
Psychiatric disorders include a number of eccentricities in human behavior .Tom had them all. A schizotypal rejected frontally any social relation, a bipolar changed mood from happiness to sadness as easily and repeatedly as the sway of a swing, and a schizoid had violent tendencies. Furthermore, Tom would adopt different personalities or identities. His psychiatrist had also diagnosed a dissociative identity disorder that divided the brain into multiple mental parts. It was unusual that people who had the power to adopt two or more personalities or identities in an alternating way, which were ab
le to control the behavior of the patient, also had personality disorders. But there was a chance of having them all, and Tom had them all .Jack was an evil, cruelly intelligent psychopath, Danny was a weakling and very fearful eight-year-old boy, and Charlie was a teenager with reckless ideas and hooligan acts.
Tom had them all.
He even had different sexual conditions.
Sometimes he was Sue.
Sometimes, he was a homosexual named William.
But after all, Tom had a slight mental retardation.
5
The next day, the moving van was there.
It was Monday, and the clock struck nine thirty with its tiny plastic hands.
Stella only vaguely remembered what had happened last night, certainly. More of the same, she thought ironically. Tom was still crushed against the window pane, picking his nose with the index finger that barely had a nail tip, as it was nibbled continuously.
Of course Tom did not remember anything about last night.
However, he was certain that there was something in the closet, though now in the morning he had completely ignored it.
The day was radiant, and the sun was falling hard. Night had once again devoured the presence of clouds in a clear and cheerful sky.
Stella went out holding a broom to do something. But that was something misleading, since what she was really up to was to smell, to get a glimpse of the new neighbors next door.
A fairly new, shiny blue Ford stopped in a squeal of wheels, and a tall man with a bulging belly jumped out of the car to tell the men of the moving company to handle carefully what they had in their hands, since they were already unloading the furniture.
Louis was a computer programmer who had somehow anticipated his retirement at the young age of 45. He was missing all the fingers of his right hand. One fateful morning, he was discussing a bad play from the Lake Siders with a co-worker as he accidentally put his hand into the paper shredder, smiling at his colleague. A moment later, everything was pain and a boisterous blood splattering on his shoes. When he saw this, he lost consciousness and fainted.
However, after the long and slow operation, Louis had been willing to get an early retirement by accident. $1000 a month were not bad at all. A year after the accident, he had gained twelve kilos and saw his slim belly get full of gas. His hand was now a stump.
Behind him, his wife Eillen, his daughter Samantha, an exquisite teenage girl with scandalous curves and a jet-black bush of hair waving in the wind, and behind them, the youngest boy, got out of the car. Tony Crandall was a little man just five years old with a snub nose.
Stella was staring at them with the broom in her hand, frowning, when Eillen noticed her.
"Good morning, ma’am! We are the new neighbors."
Stella smiled a cynical smile and got ready to sweep awkwardly the grass, which was actually removed earth.
"My name is Eillen, and this is my husband Louis and my children Samantha and Tony, the youngest of the family." Eillen drew a large smile on her enormously pleased face as she pointed at her husband, and Stella raised a trembling hand of large knuckles.
... And who cared who they were. In a village like Road House, everyone cared.
Stella dropped the broom to the side and approached lightly toward the new neighbor to introduce herself.
"My name is Stella Rush," she said, reaching over the wooden fence between the two gardens, a smile on her lips.
"Nice to meet you," Eillen said, holding out her hand .Louis? Would you come for a moment?" She turned to her husband, who was instructing the men.
"Yes, my dear, I'm coming right now," Louis said, turning his head, digging some keys in his jeans pocket.
"My husband is a lovely person," Eillen said proudly.
... Of course, that's what all the sluts say.
Louis came up to them with strange jumps (after handing the keys to one of the men), his shirt out of his jeans and sweating copiously down his forehead. He was balding, and you could see his crown when he bent slightly. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and a beautiful brand watch with large, golden needles.
"Honey, I'll introduce you to Stella. She’s our neighbor next door," Eillen said, smiling.
Louis held out his left hand to Stella as he smiled politely.
"Sorry, ma'am." Louis smiled. "An accident."
Stella looked at the stump of his right hand. It was a work of art. But it was disgusting to look at. There was something disgusting in it.
"Things happen" Stella said with a cynical smile.
"What? Ah, right!" Louis was not very convinced, but he smiled contemptuously.
Tony tangled himself between his father's legs and said something. Something that sounded like 'slut'. His father took him in his arms and put his hand on his mouth.
"Do not say that, Tony. Introduce yourself to this good lady."
Stella forced a smile after a cold, glassy look.
"Huh... Hello, ma'am."
"Very good!" Louis said excitedly, proud of his son.
Samantha showed a beautiful, sensual smile drawn on her lips. Those lips that would be the object of desire very soon among the youth of Road House, well if that would happen. She held out her hand to Stella. A warm and perfect hand, sensitive at the same time.
Stella shook it and squeezed it with some malice.
Samantha left, puzzled.
"Very good. Since we all know each other, why don't we go do our thing?" Eillen asked, smiling.
Stella nodded and grinned. It was a forced and strenuous smile. A smile that hid something evil. She took some steps away from the group slightly and said
"Yes, I agree to it. We have a lot of work ahead of us."
"Yeah right!" She gestured to the movers, who were already entering a sofa by the door of her new home. That feeling made her feel nostalgic. "We have much ahead." At that moment, Chumy, the Candrall's gray cat, meowed hysterically, as if he were demanding to be left out of from the damn cage, where he had spent three full days of car journey. The cat was pacing inside the free space of the cage. It was a huge cat with green eyes and very mischievous.
"What is that?" Stella asked, twisting her neck slightly as she lifted it.
Eillen turned her head toward the car.
"It's Chumy, our cat."
Stella nodded.
"Cats are not very welcome here," Stella pointed out, remembering her son. Well, at least she suspected it; she had once seen his hands stained with blood.
Eillen could only be baffled and raise her eyebrows, while she watched the cat with an inquisitive look, which was just a shadow through the windows of the car.
There was silence for a moment. After that, Stella returned to where the broom was and, before bending down to pick it up, Eillen said something behind her that she did not hear.
"What?"
"I say would you introduce us to your family later?"
Stella gave her a stupid smile.
Eillen got no answer.
"C'mon darling. We have a lot to do." Louis put his hand on her shoulder.
"Dad! I have pee" the smallest one announced.
"Oh, how good. You'll be the first to use the toilet" his mother explained, extending her arms.
Tony jumped into her arms, smiling.
An instant later, Eillen entered her new house. Soon she would find out how long it would take to find the bathroom.
Louis, however, stood for a moment watching Stella. He frowned, and his eyes crinkled behind his glasses. There was something about Stella that he did not like. And he would soon discover it.
"Dad, is something wrong?" Samantha asked, slightly alarmed, her forehead wrinkled.
Louis returned to himself.
"Oh, nothing. It's just that this woman is eccentric" he explained, turning to Samantha and kissing her on the forehead. "Let's go inside. We have a lot to do today." They embraced each other and entered the house on the warm July morning.
6
Sometimes Tom a
dopted the identity of Justin, a sexual addict, but fortunately all that madness had not yet come out of him. He had not yet masturbated, but soon that would be history. But for sure, Justin would come back and dilate his compulsive obsession and craze for sex, and it would become a daily problem for him. But he was still on time. However, once activated, this disorder would become a chronic, intense problem that would be beyond his power to control. In that culminating point, Justin would be plunged into loneliness, depression, anxiety, stress, and madness. Justin's time was about to begin, and his first prey had already arrived.
7
By nine, the moving van and the staff had left. They had been tipped with a couple of hamburgers from the day before, a few cans of beer, and ten dollars. Tony, the smallest one, slept in his new room on a mattress on the floor, with a mountain of boxes at his feet, his innumerable toys waiting in the boxes for mom to nail them one by one on the wall, just as Tony liked.
Before, Eillen had walked the house from top to bottom with startling nervousness and Tony in her arms. It was the first time she actually saw the house, inside and out. It was Louis who saw it first a few weeks before. She had chosen it from a dozen photographs. But Louis had not even seen its inside either. As soon as they entered, his eyes opened horrifyingly in a frown of excited surprise.
The house was huge and elegant. It had four rooms upstairs and two downstairs. There was a splendid kitchen in which you could dive in the sink head-first and a spacious and large dining room where Louis already saw all his books on the shelves.
A first sensation of nostalgia for her old home filled him as he ran in house from top to bottom, but the feeling gradually diminished, as he could imagine their stuff in place. That gave a healthier aspect to the house.
He was actually beginning to identify with his new home.
However, the stress from the day did not allow him to fall asleep.
Chumy, the cat, had spent all day sniffing around the corners of the new house, meowing tirelessly, and tangling in Louis's feet. He had finally fallen exhausted from curiosity, and now he was curled up at Tony's feet, of course, purring indefatigably.
"Don't you think it's a bit strange?" Louis had told Eillen, and she had merely moved her head with her eyes closed.
Tom´s Story Page 2