The Book of Paul -- A Paranormal Thriller

by Richard Long

  In the early sixties, television was mostly black and white (or maybe mother was too cheap to buy a color set…I’m not quite sure, I was only a boy then). So when people were shot and they grabbed their guts in all those cop shows and westerns, you’d see a trickle of black oozing out from their vests. Black blood. The Daily News used to sell gore on the covers too. The body fallen from the seventh-floor window, the bullet-in-the-back-of-the-head mob murder—it was there on the front page for all to see, in glorious black and white.

  I’ve never really lost that fascination. On the contrary, it’s increased quite dramatically over the years. I looked at the picture of the girl with the rings, studs and barbells all over her pretty face and thought that it couldn’t be that bad inside. So I braced myself, clicked the Extreme Body Modification link and…boom…I had to fill out a credit card application because this part of the site was for members only. I filled out the application and without a single boom, I was greeted with the most shocking, mind-numbing horrors in a lifetime of horror seeking.

  Pause. Breathe. Gulp. I couldn’t decide which was more disgusting, the full color images of the actual “feats” accomplished (now that’s real, that’s news!), or the bland Matter O’ Fact pseudo-medical descriptions of the techniques themselves: scalpel piercings, uvula piercings, scrotal implants, transdermal implants, urethral stretching, subincision, meatonomy!

  What’s a subincision? You don’t want to know. What’s a meatonomy? You don’t want to know. And it got worse and worse. Grafts and implants. Fingernail removal (temporary and permanent). Urethral relocation. Penis bifurcation. Voluntary amputation. Nullification! What’s nullification? Take a guess. From the verb to nullify: destroy, abolish, ruin, dispose of, put an end to, get rid of…cut off. Cut off what? You guessed it. Your thingees. All your thingees.

  I stopped and rested and got my guts to settle down and I definitely should have left then, but I couldn’t and I moved my hand and pressed the mouse and click…I saw the shots of the man with a meat cleaver standing next to a butcher block.

  Fuck. You know, I almost always call a dick a cock. I just think the word makes more sense when we’re talking about one in use. But when you’re talking about an ex-cock, I guess you’d have to call it a dick.

  Try it yourself:

  “He cut his own cock off.” or “He cut his own dick off.”

  See what I mean?

  Michael Bean was a skinny blond rat who wanted to think he was brave. He wasn’t. He was a very scared young man who would have been called pretty if he didn’t try so hard to pass himself off as a Street Trash Artist Radical, which he was only in the sense that he slept in an abandoned building on Avenue D, panhandled on Avenue A, threw rocks at the police (from the very rear of the crowd) on Avenue B and occasionally read really bad poetry, really badly in a really bad poetry cafe on Avenue C.

  And of course, he did his best to cultivate the right look. The Street Trash Artist Radical look in its latest incarnation consisted of greasy dreadlocks, sparse (so sparse you can count the hairs) beard, multiple facial piercings (eyebrow, ear, nose and tongue), dirty white-and-black horizontal striped T-shirt, dirty orange-and-blue sneakers, and very dirty, very baggy olive corduroy pants.

  It looked like he wore the same clothes every day. He did. He was wearing them now as he sat on his filthy mattress, staring at the ceiling, listening to the awful scream coming from upstairs. It wasn’t the first time he’d heard a scream like that coming from the top floor. He’d heard them so often that he would have called the police if he weren’t a Street Trash Artist Radical and didn’t live in an illegal condemned building and didn’t just hate those fucking cops, man. So instead, he listened to someone screaming like they were being disemboweled every few days, jamming a pillow over his head to filter out the sounds, always failing miserably. He rarely heard such screams during the day. And he’d never heard one that was quite so…

  “Intense,” he said to the cracked plaster ceiling over his head, hoping the sound of his own voice would shatter the panic rising in his guts. He wanted it to stop…wanted to explain it away like he always did, but the scream went on and on, swelling like a choir inside a volcano. What if someone’s dying? I have to do something! I have to do something now!

  Just as the last rays of sunlight disappeared, the screaming stopped. He stared at the ceiling for a very long time—like he was waiting for an answer. The question was whether or not he should go upstairs and find out what happened. Michael stared and stared, but the ceiling didn’t say a thing.

  Well, maybe everything’s okay. But as many times as he’d been able to tell himself that in the past, this time it wasn’t working.

  Michael wanted to be brave. But more than anything, he didn’t want to go up and knock on that door. He’d never seen the man on the top floor. No one in the building would even talk about him, except for the nut on the first floor with the hair down to his ass who said he knew the guy and that he was, “Amazing, man.”

  When Michael stood up and walked to the door, he couldn’t believe he summoned the will to move. Now that the sun had set, it was as dark in the lightless hallway as it was outside. Maybe darker. But the strange compulsion propelling him gave another push and with more courage than he ever expected to feel, Michael started up the stairs.

  It didn’t make it any easier that they creaked when he walked.

  Paul yanked the nail from Martin’s hand without warning. Martin didn’t scream this time, swallowing it back through firmly clenched teeth.

  Paul said nothing, looking for any further signs of weakness. Martin tightened his focus like a rusty bolt and drew on everything he had left inside to remain erect and still.

  After many long seconds of scrutiny, Paul relaxed his gaze, revealing the hint of a proud smile before sucking it back like a soda straw under the dead mask. He lifted a plastic milk crate next to Martin’s chair and rolled out a clean, white cotton tablecloth. The cloth was almost dazzling in its brightness. Paul sat on the crate beside him.

  In his dazed state, Martin wondered if they were having a picnic. Then he realized it was Paul’s version of a first aid kit. Paul began arranging the other contents of his bundle on the table in front of Martin. Clean bandages, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a tube of antibiotic ointment, and a long, thick, curved needle.

  “Sutures,” Martin said, unable to keep the dawning realization from escaping his lips. When Paul nodded in agreement with a twinkling smile, Martin realized something else.

  It wasn’t over yet.

  Paul was finishing up when they heard a soft, distant rapping at the front door. It sounded more like a nick than a knock. Paul stabbed in the final suture, tied it off, nipped the excess string with his yellow teeth and rose in a single motion. It should have hurt, but Martin barely noticed.

  Paul quickly vanished and the smile he flashed at Martin right before he turned on his heels seemed to linger in the air like a freshly baked meatloaf. Or was it pot roast? Then it suddenly dawned on Martin that he was sniffing more than a simile.

  “What’s he cooking?” Martin wondered as the earthy smell penetrated the stench of the back rooms. His belly grumbled in response.

  He felt like himself again. Or more accurately, he felt his familiar lack of self. Good. That’s why he came here. His mind almost sighed with relief, but collided instead with the image of a dark-haired pixie with a turned-up nose. Rose. There she was, still inside his head…beckoning with a curved index finger.

  His heart ached even more than his hand. All this for nothing. She was still there. Paul, with all his powers, couldn’t drive her away. At first, all Martin felt was despair. Nothing can stop this feeling from growing. Even Paul can’t stop it. Then slowly, very slowly, his despair faded as two dawning realizations echoed in his pain-puffed brain. The first was that his feelings for Rose felt good. Very good. The second was even sweeter and he spoke aloud what he only dared to think before.

  “Paul can’t do anything
to stop it.”

  Ting-a-ling-a-ling. The bell made the same sound when Rose left as when she entered. The only difference was the accompanying thump her shopping bag made when it banged against the doorframe as she struggled to exit. The bag was enormous, overflowing with bolts of fabric. She couldn’t wait to unroll them all over her bare kitchen floor.

  “He’s gonna love this!” she squealed, trudging toward the curb. She tried hailing a cab, but it was swing shift and they were all off duty. She began walking, looking over her shoulder every few steps in the hope of snatching a taxi, but after three blocks, she resigned herself to the long schlep home, groaning as she shifted the bag from one hand to the other every two blocks.

  She wished she were back home right now. She would knock on Martin’s door and shout, “Ta-da!” proudly displaying her wares. Or better yet, she imagined him here with her, carrying the bag so they could make another stop at Pearl Paint along the way. He would cheer her on and tell her to buy more of this and more of that and…

  No. He definitely wasn’t the shopping type. Damn. What type was he? The good fucking type. She managed a grin, but it felt hollow and empty, like she was whistling in a dark alley. Rose looked around. While not an alley, it was definitely a whole lot darker and spookier now that she’d crossed Rivington Street.

  The sky grew black and the bag grew heavier and she grew more apprehensive. Why? She didn’t see me following her, but I wondered if some part of her knew.

  She fingered the key on her necklace, cursing herself for being so superstitious, whispering a prayer in spite of herself. The polished chain felt good around her neck, the key felt even better resting against her chest. She remembered how she used to play with it when she sat in her mother’s lap, listening to her gentle voice. It felt warm and heavy. It felt safe.

  “Wear this and no harm will ever come to you,” her father said as he placed the necklace around her head after her mother’s funeral.

  “That’s not true,” she cried. “Mommy wore it all the time and…”

  “She wasn’t wearing it. She gave it to me. She wanted me to keep it safe for you. She shouldn’t have done that,” he tried to explain, his eyes tired and red.

  “You shouldn’t have let her!” she yelled, beating her little fists on his chest.

  “I know,” he said, letting her pound him as much and as hard as she could, until she finally collapsed in his arms.

  If it weren’t for the photos she kept in her shoebox, she wouldn’t be able to remember what he looked like anymore. He probably didn’t look like those pictures now anyway, or the ones in the newspapers. The infamous Johnny Turner (aka Johnny Bones) had been in a mental asylum for fifteen years, since he was twenty-seven-years old. Since Rose was a little girl.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered before they led him away. “Don’t come visit me in there. I don’t want you to see me in a cage.”

  She came anyway, as often as she could, always wearing her special necklace. Her new foster parents brought her to the creepy, castle-like fortress by train, but after the first three years, and a particularly unpleasant encounter with her father, they refused to make the long journey upstate again. Soon afterward, they moved east to Boston, enrolling her in a private school and cramming her after-school schedule with music, dancing and gymnastic lessons. That was fine with her. It took her mind off everything that had happened, just as her faux folks intended. She loved gymnastics. She made friends easily. She had a life again.

  For a long time after they moved, her father wrote her every week. She wrote him back less frequently. After a few years, his letters became so paranoid and disjointed she stopped writing at all. He said someone wanted to kill her. He told her to wear the necklace all the time. He said a lot of other things that sounded even crazier.

  “Remember the story. It’s all coming true. You have to be ready.”

  The story. Her mother used to tell her a story every night before she went to bed. She never read from a book or acted like she was making it up as she went along. There were no hesitant pauses or distant gazes out her bedroom window. The story was long enough to fill a dozen books, yet she knew it so well it seemed like her brain was a tape recorder in playback mode. It made her think of Scheherazade and the One Thousand and One Nights. Some parts of it even took place in exotic Arabian palaces, Egyptian tombs—Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. Other parts were set on faraway islands with stone circles like Stonehenge and underground caverns ruled by a Fairy Queen. All of it was utterly amazing.

  “Mommy, you should write it all down. It would make such a wonderful book,” Rose said one night after she had finished the story all the way through for the third time. It was becoming so familiar to her that she joined in from time to time, shouting out her favorite lines or whispering in the scary parts. There were lots of scary parts.

  Mommy smiled weakly and shook her head, tucking her snugly beneath the covers with the saddest look on her face she’d ever seen. She leaned over and kissed her on the forehead and said, “This story is only for telling and remembering. Don’t ever write it down or tell anyone except your own children. It’s a secret family story.” She whispered, trying to sound playful with that sad, sad look still on her face.

  Rose never asked her about making a book again. She never had much of a chance. Mommy died a few weeks later. Daddy tried to take over the storytelling a few nights after the funeral, but it made her so sad she just cried until she fell asleep. Then the police came and took him away. For good.

  When the letters from her dad came and he talked about the story, Rose felt as sad as she did on the day Mommy died. She cried till her whole face was wet. She felt angry too.

  “Why did you do it?” she yelled into her pillow after tearing the letter to shreds.

  Because he was crazy. That’s why he was in a nuthouse instead of a prison. She hadn’t spoken or written to him in almost ten years. He never wrote anymore either, but sometimes she heard his voice in her head like he was standing right next to her. His voice never sounded crazy, or angry or impatient. It sounded like he used to sound when he carried her on his shoulders. Kind. Warm. Filled with love.

  Crazy or not, she missed him horribly. He was only a forty-minute train ride away. Maybe she should buy a ticket in the morning and see if he was okay. See if he was still…

  Shit. Of course, he was still crazy. He wasn’t even close to being the same person he was when Mommy was alive. Even so…even if he did everything they said he did, she still loved him. I must be a total idiot, she thought, using her free hand to wipe the tears away.

  Rose shivered and tucked the key under her shirt, even more frightened than before. Was it the blurry image of her father’s wounded face as they led him away in shackles? The blackened sky? The angry young men leering at her as they passed her on the sidewalk, their shoulders hunched against the cooling twilight air? No. Her deepest dread sprang from a source more palpable and no less immediate than the shadowy threats around her.

  Is he thinking about me? She instantly regretting the query. If Martin was like most guys, he was probably thinking of anything else. She looked down at all her treasures and suddenly felt sad and foolish. Then she shook her head and picked up the pace, fending off her deepest insecurities with the greatest source of reassurance she could cling to.

  He just gave you a big ass bag of gold, sweetheart. He’ll be back.

  I didn’t go back to the website for a long time. Well, what I consider a long time…two weeks. It felt like forever. I thought about them all the time. The pictures. The horror. I could see them in my mind, perfectly clear…soft and red and wicked.

  I knew I shouldn’t go. If I were covered with tattoos and had titty rings and all that shit it might have made sense for me to investigate the “advanced class.” But go back there just to look? Like a voyeur at a medieval torture session? That was just crazy. Sick. So I kept telling myself no, fighting the urges. Day after day after day passed and the first thing I
thought about from the moment I opened my eyes was going over to my desk and starting up the computer and logging on and clicking that mouse and…boom…I had to do it I had to do it I couldn’t wait another day, another second!

  But I did. Every morning I brushed my teeth and went out for coffee and the paper and sat in the park and waited and waited for the itch to go away. Gradually, bit-by-bit, it did. I went on with my life, uncluttered as it was. I would find a new obsession to distract me, or an old familiar addiction, and put my time gladly in its hands. Every morning got easier until one day…I got up, made a pot of coffee and sat at my desk to fill in some journal entries. And wouldn’t you know it, without a thought or a word or a care in the world, I logged on.

  I looked at the web page and I looked at my hands and wondered aloud, but softly, “How did I get here?” The answer didn’t matter anymore. I was here and I had done it. Somehow I had done it, all by myself, but without my permission. I noticed how odd that was and I noticed that I didn’t really care. I noticed something else too, a sign Dante left for me, marking the entrance to the place I would soon call home:

  ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE.

  Michael breathed out a huge sigh of relief. He tried, didn’t he? Granted, it wasn’t very loud, but it was, undeniably, a knock. Two of them, actually. Knock. Knock. He was about to sneak gratefully back down the stairs when he heard the reply.