John’s brother lit up the bong, which was already filled with crumbled brown leaves, and took a Herculean puff, filling the room with sickly sweet smoke when he exhaled. I hacked and coughed through my first drags, but I soon felt it. Combined with the Mad Dog 20/20, the Southern Comfort, the bottle of wine being passed around and the Blizzard of Ozz album playing in the room, it sent my head reeling. The fact that nobody liked me at school began to fade out of my mind like blue Magic Marker reminders scrawled on the back of a greasy fist.
I sat there dizzily, cycling in and out, as John’s brother began ranting. His face was flushed and twisted, and he was naming dozens of ancient spirits and demons he planned to conjure up and order to kill people: teachers who had failed him, girlfriends who had dumped him, friends who had betrayed him, relatives who had mistreated him, employers who had fired him—basically anyone who had crossed his path since he was old enough to feel hatred.
Pulling a switchblade out of his pocket, John’s brother made a long slice along the surface of his thumb and let it drip into a small bowl filled with a crusty brown-and-white flecked powder. “Bad Angarru!” he began chanting. “Ninnghizhidda! Thee I invoke, Serpent of the Deep! Thee I invoke, Ninnghizhidda, Horned Serpent of the Deep! Thee I invoke, Plumed Serpent of the Deep! Ninnghizhidda!”
He paused and took another toke, then rubbed the bloody powder against his lips, only vaguely aware of our presence.
“I summon thee, Creature of Darkness, by the works of darkness! I summon thee, Creature of Hatred, by the works of hatred! I summon thee, Creature of the Wastes, by the rites of the waste! I summon thee, Creature of Pain, by the words of pain!”
If this was what pot was like, I didn’t want to be on it. I just kept staring at the gun, hoping John’s brother wouldn’t pick it up. At the same time, I was trying not to let him know I was staring at the gun because I didn’t want to draw attention to it. He was clearly deranged, and if he wasn’t a murderer already, there seemed to be no reason why he couldn’t be one by the end of the night.
Minutes or hours elapsed. The bong kept coming around, but the water inside had been replaced with Southern Comfort in an attempt to get us even more fucked up. The Black Sabbath song “Paranoid” was playing on the stereo or in my head, the cat was hissing at me, the room was spinning, John’s brother was daring me to drink the Southern Comfort out of the bong and John was chanting “chug it.” Spineless worm that I was, I lifted the bong to my pot-parched lips, held my breath and downed what may have been the foulest shot ever concocted. Then... I don’t know what happened. I can only assume that I blacked out and became just another canvas for the various subtle cruelties of the Crowell brothers.
I awoke to the sound of hissing at five P.M. (which seemed like a late time for me to wake up back then). The cat was still stalking me. I felt my eyes: They were still there. Then I threw up. Then I threw up again. And again. But as I knelt doubled over above the toilet, I realized that I had learned something from the previous night: that I could use black magic to turn the lowly lot life had given me around—to attain a position of power that other people would envy and accomplish things that other people couldn’t. I also learned that I didn’t like smoking pot—or the taste of bongwater.
THE WORM SHEDS ITS SKIN
The first time I realized something was wrong with our family was when I was six and my father bought me a book about a giraffe that had been personalized so that I was a character in the story, going on adventures with the animal. The only problem was that my name was spelled Brain all through the book, which made for a disturbing image of a giraffe with a brain clinging to its back. I don’t think my father even realized the mistake—and he had supposedly named me.
It was emblematic of the way he had always treated me, which is that he didn’t treat me at all. He didn’t care and wasn’t around to care. If I wanted his attention, it was usually given to me with a belt doubled-over to make a loud snapping sound when it connected with my backside. When he came home from work and I was laying around playing Colecovision or drawing pictures, he would always find an excuse, like an unmown lawn or a full dishwasher, to blow up at me. I soon learned to look busy and responsible when he walked in, even if there was nothing to do. My mother always dismissed his violent outbursts as part of the same Vietnam War post-traumatic stress disorder that caused him to wake up in the middle of the night screaming and smashing things. As a teenager, whenever I brought friends home, he would ask them, “Have you ever sucked a sweeter dick than mine?” It was a trick question because, whether they said yes or no, they still ended up with his dick in their mouth, at least in the comedic sense of the question.
Occasionally, my father promised to take me places, but more often than not something more pressing would come up at work. Only on a few memorable occasions did we do anything together. Usually, he took me on his motorcycle to a strip mine near our house, where, using a rifle he had removed from the corpse of a Viet Cong soldier, he taught me how to shoot. I inherited good aim from my father, which served me well whether shooting BB guns at animals or throwing rocks at cops. I also inherited a bad temper with a short fuse, a headstrong ambition that can only be stopped by bullets or bouncers, a blunt sense of humor, an unquenchable appetite for tits and an irregular heartbeat, which is only made worse by ingesting lots of drugs.
Although I had so much in common with my father, I never wanted to admit it. Most of my childhood and adolescence was spent in fear of him. He constantly threatened to kick me out of the house and never failed to remind me that I was worthless and would never amount to anything. So I grew up a mama’s boy, spoiled by her and ungrateful for it. In order to make sure I clung even closer to her side, my mother used to try to convince me that I was more sickly than I was so she could keep me at home and care for me. When I first began breaking out in acne, my mother told me that it was an allergic reaction to egg whites (which gave her hives), and for a long time I believed her. She wanted me to be just like her, to be dependent on her, to never leave her. When I finally did at age twenty-two, she sat in my room every day and cried until one afternoon she thought she saw Jesus in silhouette against the doorway. Taking her vision as a sign that I was being watched over, she stopped lamenting and began keeping as pets the rats she was supposed to be feeding my snake. In her own overprotective way, she replaced me with the sickliest rat, which she named Marilyn, and not only went on to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to the rodent, but now keeps it in a crudely constructed oxygen tent made from Saran Wrap to prolong its life.
As a child, you accept whatever happens in your family as normal. But when puberty hits, the pendulum swings in the other direction, and acceptance turns into resentment. In ninth grade, I began feeling more and more isolated, friendless and sexually frustrated. I used to sit at my desk in class with a pocketknife, making cuts up and down my forearm. (I still have dozens of scars beneath my tattoos.) For the most part, I didn’t bother to excel at school. Most of my education took place after class, when I escaped into a fantasy world—immersed in role-playing games, reading books like the Jim Morrison bio No One Here Gets Out Alive, writing macabre poems and short stories, and listening to records. I began to appreciate music as a universal healer, an entryway to a place where I could be accepted, a place with no rules and no judgments.
The person who had to bear the biggest brunt of my frustration was my mother. Perhaps my vitriolic outbursts against her were something else I inherited from my father. For a period, my parents had violent screaming matches because my father suspected her of cheating on him with an ex-cop turned private investigator. My father had always been by nature suspicious and was never able to let go of his jealousy even for my mother’s first boyfriend, Dick Reed, a scrawny guy whose ass my dad beat the day he met my mother at the age of fifteen. One of their louder fights took place after my father went through her purse, pulled out a wadded-up washcloth and demanded an explanation for it. I never figured out what was so suspicious
about the item—whether it was from a strange hotel or it had been used to mop up semen. I remember the investigator in question coming by the house a few times with machine guns and Soldier of Fortune magazines, which impressed me because I was still interested in a career in espionage. Hate and anger are infectious, however, and I soon began resenting my mother because I thought she was breaking up the marriage. I used to sit on my bed and cry thinking about what would happen if my parents split up. I was afraid I’d have to choose between them and, because I was scared of my father, end up moving away and living in poverty with my mother.
MOM
In my room along with my Kiss posters, hand-drawn cartoons and rock albums, I also had a collection of glass Avon cologne bottles that my grandmother had given me. Each one was shaped like a different car, and I think it was the Excalibur that sent my mother to the hospital one night. She had come home late and wouldn’t tell me where she had been. Suspecting her of cheating, I lost the temper my father had handed down to me and threw the bottle at her face, opening up a bloody gash over her lip and scattering cheap perfume and shards of blue glass across my floor. She still has a scar, which has served as her constant reminder never to have another child. In altercations that followed, I hit her, spit on her and tried to choke her. She never retaliated. She just cried, and I never felt sorry for her.
The anger I had pent up for being sent to Christian school, however, began to dissipate later in public school. My mother would let me stay home sick if, say, I couldn’t comb my hair flat and didn’t want any girls to see me or if someone at school wanted to beat me senseless. I began to appreciate her for it. But that, too, was only a phase.
As I lay in my bed that last night in Canton, I hated my parents more than I had ever hated them before. I was finally beginning to fit in in Canton, and now I had to live on the outskirts of frat-boy Fort Lauderdale because my father had gotten a new and boring job as a furniture salesman. I’d made it through the darkest places—from haunted houses to high school gyms. I’d had bad drugs, worse sex and no self-esteem. It was all over and behind me, and now I had to start all over again. I wasn’t excited to move. I was bitter and angry—not just at my parents, but at the world.
the road to hell is paved with good rejection letters
I WAS SOMEWHAT LONELY, AND I SOON DEVELOPED DISAGREEABLE MANNERISMS WHICH MADE ME UNPOPULAR THROUGHOUT MY SCHOOLDAYS. I HAD THE LONELY CHILD’S HABIT OF MAKING UP STORIES AND HOLDING CONVERSATIONS WITH IMAGINARY PERSONS, AND I THINK FROM THE VERY START MY LITERARY AMBITIONS WERE MIXED UP WITH THE FEELING OF BEING ISOLATED AND UNDERVALUED. I KNEW THAT I HAD A FACILITY WITH WORDS AND A POWER OF FACING UNPLEASANT FACTS, AND I FELT THAT THIS CREATED A SORT OF PRIVATE WORLD IN WHICH I COULD GET MY OWN BACK FOR MY FAILURE IN EVERYDAY LIFE.
—George Orwell, “Why I Write”
January 20, 1988
Brian Warner
3450 Banks Rd. #207
Margate, FL 33063
John Glazer, Editor
Night Terrors Magazine
1007 Union Street
Schenectady, NY 12308
Dear John Glazer,
Enclosed is my previously unpublished story, “All in the Family.” It is being submitted only to your magazine at the time. I would appreciate your consideration for a possible publication of the above mentioned story. I thank you for your time, and will be looking forward to your reply.
Sincerely,
Brian Warner
ALL IN THE FAMILY
by Brian Warner
He hoped the tape recorder would still work. It was one of those small portable ones often used in schools or libraries. Teddy didn’t even realize the irony of his action—Angie was in fact the one who had bought it for him. He wiped the hair and blood off the corner and released a sigh of frustration. “Mother will probably ground me from the television,” he considered, looking to the mess he had made.
“Damn her. Damn them all. Why did she have to hurt Peg? Why?” Balefully, he kicked the corpse beside him. Her glazed eyes stared back at him with empty fascination. “You bitch. You killed Peg.”
His sister’s dead look gave no response. (He wondered why.) Her face looked so shadowed. He lifted her head up by her clotted hair and saw that it was dried blood on her cheek that created the mock shadow. He saw, too, that the dent in her skull had stopped gushing; the coagulated blood had formed a gelatinous plug.
Mother would be home soon. He would have to dig a grave.
Teddy got up and walked to his bedroom where Peg’s plastic body lay deflated. Atop her bloodless chest was a kitchen knife and she stared at the ceiling with her permanent expression–mouth in the shape of an 0. She looked as if she would scream.
He picked up the doll’s head and looked tearfully at the flat terrain of her airless, life-sized figure. Cradling her head, he began to cry–each tear held a thousand wishes to bring her back. He was glad Angie was dead–she had deserved every last blow. As Teddy stroked her artificial hair he noticed the stench coming from his sister who lay several feet away. He knew it was urine–he had heard her bladder release when he struck the final deadly blow. He had hit her once more for good measure–she killed Peg. He had every right.
Carefully, he let Peg’s head rest on the carpet. Bending down, he kissed her cheek and wiped some sticky stuff from her rubber lip. Mom had told him before not to touch Peg or to make the nasty in her mouth, but he couldn’t help it. He loved her too much just to leave her be. If Mom found out he was doing the nasty then she would take Peg away, like before—he would have to find her too.
As Teddy went back to Angie’s body he stopped for a moment to marvel at her nudity. He had always watched her dress from the closet, but he had never seen her thing up close. He was fascinated by the dark tuft of hair between her legs–Peg didn’t have that. Cautiously he touched her thigh, and jerked away as if her flesh were hot. It wasn’t, though. In fact, she was starting to get cold. It had been four hours.
“I hate you,” he informed her cadaver eyes.
Again he touched her thigh, but this time he didn’t pull away. Gently, he ran his fingertips up her hip and toward her crotch. With the other hand, he pulled her muscled legs apart. Between them was a puddle of urine the size of a pancake. He gave her genitals a curious poke. She was much softer than Peg, and wait–although her body was cold and pallid, she was warm inside. He was getting excited by her macabre sexual divinity.
He had to stop–Mother would be upset if he was doing the nasty. She hated the nasty; Dad had found that out the hard way. All she liked was sewing and watching Family Feud. She loved that Richard Dawson guy.
But she was so yielding, so doughy. Peg’s skin was hard and waxy inside–he’d had her for ten years (when he was eighteen he ordered her from a dirty magazine). Angie was only five then, and now she had matured into a beautiful young woman. He really didn’t hate her that much but she shouldn’t have killed Peg. He was only watching her shower. It was nothing new. But she would have told Mother, Mother couldn’t stand for that kind of filth in her house. That’s why he had to hide Peg in the first place. Mother was so old-fashioned; he had to hide a lot from Mother.
Going to the garage, he fetched a spade and began digging in the garden. He had to finish before she got home.
The soil was tender, and it took but a half hour to make the grave.
Time was precious so he went in and cleaned up. He grabbed a towel and went to Angie’s room. Grabbing both her arms, he pulled her back a few feet–the puddle had soaked into the carpet, leaving a dark stain. He carefully sopped it up and threw the towel in her closet.
As he dragged her through the living room, he considered an idea. It was the best idea he had ever had. If Mother had liked the nasty, she would have been proud of his idea.
He dropped Angie’s arms and went back to his room. It pained him to look at Peg’s wasted body; the gash in her chest seemed bigger and painful. But she was old, he thought. Maybe it was best she had died.
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br /> Teddy tossed the knife and carried the rubber doll’s limp torso through the kitchen into the back yard. “I’m sorry Peg,” he told her painted face. He wouldn’t bury her just yet—first he wanted to try out his idea. If it worked, then he would cover her up.
It was almost time, he would have to hurry. Back in his sister’s room, he took off his jeans and knelt beside the corpse. The smell of death was pungent and sickening, but life was too frightening for him to handle. He was more of a watcher. But it was too late for watching and she would be perfect. He could hide her. Just like Peg.
As Teddy mounted his sister in a fumbling, incestuous act of necrophilia, Mother’s car pulled into the cracked driveway. She saw through the grimy windshield the rotting bags of trash piled among the weeds near the porch. That damnable Teddy. Just like his father.
Merely four strokes within her, Teddy finished shamefully; he stayed inside for a few moments–he liked the slimy grip on his flesh. He was embarrassed, but he liked the nasty stuff so much. Why couldn’t Mother understand his needs?
“Teddy, didn’t I tell you to take out the trash?” she hollered as the front door opened, slamming into the wall. She grimaced as a rat scuttled from somewhere to anywhere. A catalog of punishments befuddled her mind as she crossed the living room.
Teddy froze. How could he explain this to Mother? He would have to hide Angie; if Mother saw what–
“Teddy.”
As Mother hobbled into the hall, he looked up from his disgraceful position.
She stood above him, ancient and leviathan from his angle. Her cane loomed over him like a tree trunk.
Teddy’s frozen panic melted and he leapt up and hurriedly cupped his naughty parts, hiding them from Mother.
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