Boyer said nothing; he waited for Emily to continue.
“A few days after Amy was born, her mother and father sat up late one night talking. They talked about the uncertainty of the world and how worried they were about their child’s future. They knew they would be raising a healthy, happy, productive human being. They knew their child would love them, would grow up to be a good person. They knew this with all their heart. But they were still afraid. They knew the world was full of...uncertainties...that they couldn’t trust some people...they knew there would come a time in her life when their daughter would come in contact with people who would either wish to do harm to her or would unwillingly put her in that position. They knew that even if their daughter was as careful as they were going to raise her to be, they couldn’t protect her from everything. They couldn’t be their twenty-four-seven. So...” She raised her left hand, fingers splayed out; the pinkie was missing. “...they made a deal.”
Boyer’s eyes grew wide. He looked at Jeff, who was now looking at them, his own left hand held up, left pinkie missing. Emily watched him, noting the sharp rise in the Officer’s breathing. “Do you understand what we’re talking about, Officer Boyer?”
“I...” Boyer said, eyes darting from Emily to Jeff. “I don’t know.”
“I’ll spell it out for you. You believe in God, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Jeff and I do too. But we also know that God...sometimes allows bad things to happen to good people. We’ve tried to understand why He allows this...and we both knew that if...something bad were to happen to our Amy that we would be devastated. And that God...wouldn’t care. He wouldn’t care about our suffering and anguish. I know that’s probably blasphemous to you, Officer Boyer, hearing two self-professed Christians like ourselves saying God wouldn’t care if he were to allow an innocent child to suffer. But...why does He allow so much suffering to exist in the world? Why does he allow children to step on land mines in Viet Nam, and why does he allow monsters to snatch children off the street, never to bring them back?” She faced Officer Boyer, the adrenaline running through her veins. “Why?”
Officer Boyer opened his mouth to answer and couldn’t.
“Nobody can answer that question to my satisfaction, Officer Boyer,” Emily continued. “Not my pastor, not a priest, not any minister I’ve spoken to. Nobody. Their answers ring false to me. And since we believed in God we began to...explore other options.” She looked at Officer Boyer, left hand raised to emphasize her sacrifice. “If God wasn’t going to care about the suffering of a little child, then we were going to do everything in our power to make sure nothing happened to our daughter. Anything.”
Officer Boyer sputtered. “You mean, you—”
“We made a deal,” Jeff said from the kitchen table, his face pale now, shoulders sagging with the weight of the dreadful implications of what had happened. “A protector for Amy who would only come to the rescue in the event she was put in imminent danger. Her life and soul for our souls. It would only become due and payable in the event...something like this were to happen.”
Officer Boyer’s face paled. “You...am I...are you telling me you sold your soul to—”
“The devil? A demon? Something like that, I suppose,” Jeff said. Emily held back, her emotions running high. “It took months of research and prayer and...once we made the decision it was relatively easy. You can pray to demons just like you pray to God or Jesus or the angels. They answer your prayers the same way. But they do want...certain sacrifices.” He held up his left hand, emphasizing the missing finger.
“You cut off your own fingers?” Officer Boyer asked.
“It’s what the dark forces asked for,” Emily said, her right hand caressing the spot where her left pinkie finger used to be. “It wasn’t too difficult. Whiskey to deaden the pain, bandages to staunch the flow of blood when the ritual was over. We both used Jeff’s electric bandsaw in the garage. Made it easier to explain to the doctors at Ephrata that Jeff slipped and fell while working in the garage and when I went to help him, I slipped and fell right beside him. They dismissed us as unlucky klutz’s and patched us up.”
“We told them we’d been in too much shock to retrieve the fingers,” Jeff continued. “That they’d fallen somewhere we couldn’t get to them, that we realized we needed immediate medical attention and they worked with what they had. That made it easier to explain why they were missing when they couldn’t be found later—rats, foxes, some small animal.”
“They bought it,” Emily said. “And we adjusted. It was a small sacrifice to make. We’d do anything to keep Amy safe.”
“And now we know our boon was a success,” Jeff said, his features grim. “The thing that protected our daughter that night...a dark demon created from our blood. That explains why you got a match.”
“But—“ Officer Boyer sputtered.
“Don’t you believe us?” Jeff asked.
“You’re asking me to believe...this?”
“Do you smell anything odd, Officer Boyer?” Emily asked.
“Huh?” Officer Boyer looked at her, puzzled.
“Sniff the air.” She sniffed. “Smell anything unusual?”
Officer Boyer sniffed a couple of times. His brow furrowed in concentration. “Smells kinda like...it’s really faint...but...” He sniffed a few more times. “It smells like...something’s burning...like sulfur...”
“That’s brimstone you’re smelling, Officer Boyer,” Emily said, the tears streaming down her cheeks now. “You smell brimstone. We’ve been smelling it now ever since the day we were reunited with Amy, and everybody that’s...that’s been around us...has mentioned smelling it. It’s...our mark.” She broke down and wept silently.
Officer Boyer looked stunned. He turned to Jeff. “You mean...”
“‘But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.’” Jeff said. “That’s from the Book of Revelations, Officer Boyer. It’s a reminder that the bargain Emily and I made is now due and payable,”
And as Jeff put his arms around Emily in an attempt to comfort her, Officer Boyer could only stand in their living room, his features still bearing a sense of shock. Emily wept, not caring what Officer Boyer did now. There was nothing he could do to them.
Officer Boyer turned away, his features still shocked. “I’ll see what I can come up with for the report I’m supposed to file to the Prosecutor.”
Jeff’s hand stroked Emily’s hair. “Are you going to tell them what we just told you?”
Officer Boyer looked at Jeff and shook his head. “No. They wouldn’t believe me.”
“Do you believe us?”
Officer Boyer looked at them for a long time. Emily’s sobs trickled down and she regarded him through tear-blurred eyes. “My rational side tells me I shouldn’t,” he said. “But...like you said...I’m a Christian man. And...”
Jeff and Emily said nothing. They held each other, watching as Officer Boyer came to grips with their revelation.
Officer Boyer’s eyes reflected a sense of haunting. “I can’t begin to imagine what you went through. To love your child that much to put yourselves...your souls...”
Officer Boyer shook his head and walked quietly out the front door. Leaving the Doyle family alone.
And as he drove to the station, trying to think of something to put down in his report that would explain Banning’s cause of death, he couldn’t get the lingering scent of brimstone out of his nostrils.
Addict
IT WAS A place he stopped by occasionally on his way home from work and, like most underground porn flea markets, it moved around periodically. This time it was in a modern three-bedroom tract home in Alhambra. Dennis Hillman stopped by shortly before 2 p.m. after having left work early for the day.
He tried to stifle a yawn as he flipped through home-made magazines containing ph
otos of various sexual acts. Normal garden variety in-and-out didn’t do much for him anymore. It hadn’t in a few years. The deeper he got into it, the more hardcore his pornography had to be. It was his unique tastes in pornography that led him to seek out places such as Carl Grossman’s group a year or two back. You couldn’t find bestiality or scat stuff in neighborhood porn shops. Or women being fucked by guys with dicks the size of those little souvenir baseball bats you could pick up at Dodger Stadium.
There were half a dozen other porn junkies browsing through Carl’s wares this afternoon. Dennis ignored them as he silently sifted through the materials. None of it excited him anymore. He felt a slight sense of disgust with himself as he leafed through a rape magazine. Violence didn’t even turn him on anymore.
Carl Grossman lumbered over. “Got something I think you might enjoy.” Carl was a huge fat man; he looked like a crowd of fat people squeezed into a tight suit. His trousers were wearing thin, the tails of his white shirt was coming out from his pants. Even though Carl didn’t work a normal job, he still tried to dress as if he had a regular nine-to-fiver. His tie was stained with grease and ketchup.
“What is it?” Dennis said, already bored.
“Come this way,” Carl beckoned. He turned and Dennis followed him down a dim hallway to the rear of the house.
“Just got this in the day before yesterday,” Carl said, weaving his way through boxes piled on the floor. He opened a box and rummaged around inside it before he found what he was looking for. Dennis let his eyes stray around the room as Carl looked for the thing he wanted to show him; this was where Carl kept stuff for the hardcore freaks. His eyes rested briefly on a still from a bestiality film depicting a young woman with thin limbs and heroin sculpted cheekbones on her hands and knees being fucked by a large monkey. “Here it is,” Carl said, handing Dennis the item.
Dennis picked it up. It was a magazine, the cover showing a woman with blonde hair lying on a bed. Her throat was slit, a great cascade of blood spilling down her chest and on the mattress. Her eyes were open and glazed over.
Dennis handed the magazine back. “It’s snuff, and every snuff film I’ve ever seen is fake. Don’t try to pawn this shit on me.”
“It ain’t snuff,” Carl said, handing the magazine back to Dennis. “Take a better look at it.”
Dennis sighed and began flipping through the magazine, growing more disgusted with himself. What he should be doing was working at the office; he had to finish that CPM spreadsheet for a meeting next week. But the pull of desire was strong and he needed an outlet. Admit it, Dennis thought, his hands trembling slightly as he flipped through the pages of the magazine. You’re a hardcore porn junkie. You’re addicted to this shit and you know it.
The photos in the next few pages showed the same woman from different angles. The next few pages showed a young man, about twenty years old, climbing onto the bed with the woman and embracing her. The next few pages had photographs of the young man sticking his cock between the woman’s lips and shoving it into her mouth. That particular set of photos ended with the man vaginally penetrating her.
“What is this, some kind of special effects thing?” Dennis asked, his curiosity only slightly aroused.
Carl shook his head, a sick grin on his face. “Keep looking.”
The next few pages showed different subjects. One was of what appeared to be an old man, his belly puffy and distended, the flesh of his torso the color of dark storm clouds. A woman who looked like a junkie was sucking his flaccid penis. It wasn’t until he got to the old woman—what Dennis thought was an old woman—that he stopped and stared at the picture, his stomach curling in his belly.
He flipped back through the magazine, looking at the photos again. His eyes were wide. “You mean...this shit is real?”
Carl grinned. “As real as they get, Dennis.”
The photo that had stopped Dennis in his tracks was that of an old woman. She must have been Caucasian because her hair was straight and long. Her skin was black and blue and green in places, some of it wet-looking. There were spots of white in various parts of the body. As Dennis flipped through it the photos got perversely worse. There were close-ups of her decayed face, the eyelids sunken in. There were close-ups of her rotting breasts, the flesh falling off her arm bones. It wasn’t until the man entered the picture that Dennis held his breath. Even though he found it hard to go through the rest of the magazine, he did so anyway. His eyes were riveted on the scenes of the faceless man’s cock buried in the rotting woman’s pussy, the close ups of the man’s penis with brown, maggot-ridden, rotted flesh caked to it amidst creamy semen.
Dennis closed the magazine. He couldn’t breathe, he was that excited. “Where did you get this?”
Carl shrugged. “Just got it in a few days ago. A local outfit. You want it?”
“How much?”
“Fifteen hundred.”
Normally Dennis would have paid for it, but he hadn’t come prepared to pay that much money for something. “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” he said, handing the magazine back to Carl. “I’ll call you.”
Carl smiled and put the magazine back where he’d found it. “You do that.”
Dennis exited the house with a sense of shaking excitement that chased him on the drive home. He couldn’t get his mind off that image of the corpse of the old woman being fucked by the faceless stranger.
“DENNIS, ARE YOU okay?”
“Hmmm? ” Dennis snapped awake, banishing the daydream that had been floating through his mind. He was replaying the images of the necrophilia photo in his dreams again, wondering what it felt like to fuck a rotting corpse. Trying to imagine what the sensation must feel like on your dick.
“You’ve been awfully quiet tonight. Everything okay at work?”
“Yeah, everything’s fine.”
Dennis was sitting up in bed watching the evening news. His wife, Carrie, was sitting next to him doing her nails. Their son, Justin, was in his room doing God knew what on the internet and their daughter, Elizabeth, was in her room talking on the phone with her friends. Dennis had hardly paid attention to his children when he got home this afternoon. All he’d been able to think of were the images from that magazine.
Carrie lolled on the bed, her hair up in curlers. Dennis tried not to look at her; she’d grown increasingly flabby in the past five years. Her ass was a mile wide, the cellulite on her thighs quivered like Jell-O. Dennis tried to get his wife to accompany him to the gym, but she showed no interest. “I’ve got an early morning and late afternoon meeting tomorrow,” he said, flipping through the channels, “so I won’t be home till late. That okay with you?”
“Fine with me,” Carrie said, finishing her nails. “What’s on Channel Two?”
And that’s the way things went every night. It was the way things had been for fifteen years. The minute they began to have kids, their sex life took a nosedive. And to compensate, Dennis sought to relieve his outlet through other means. Pornography.
And the more he got into it, the more he needed to satiate his needs. Where before he couldn’t stomach an anal sex scene, within a few short years he began to crave it...where before he flinched at the barest suggestion of S&M, within a few years he was exploring every aspect of that subculture. Where before he’d gagged at the site of a woman sucking a Great Dane’s cock, or some redneck fucking a sheep, now bestiality films held a strange fascination for him. And while he had heard of snuff films over the years, the closest he’d ever come to seeing one was an extreme hardcore loop Carl Grossman sold him. The clip showed a woman being viscously whipped, then burned with a hot piece of metal as she dangled from the ceiling in an abandoned warehouse. The first time Dennis saw the clip it disturbed him. Later viewings turned him on. He currently kept the tape in a safe in his study and only brought it out when he knew he was going to get at least four hours to himself at home, which was rare.
Now the only thing that could get him off was the hardest of the hardco
re. Currently he possessed two additional films other than the torture film, which were the only things that could bring him to orgasm, all three he kept in the safe. One was a film showing a woman being fucked by an Orangutan; it was followed by a guy screwing a female German Shepard. The other tape was a rape film showing the very real rapes of a twelve-year-old girl, a forty-year-old toothless crack addict who looked like he was seventy, and an eighteen-year-old man who already looked like he was in his mid-forties courtesy of hard-living. Carrie would never dream that both tapes resided in a locked safe in Dennis’ study.
Before they settled down to sleep Carrie said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you. Bob Lansing called this afternoon.”
“Really?” Dennis felt his stomach clench. “What did he want?”
“To talk to you,” Carrie turned over. “He sounded surprised, like he thought you would be home.”
“Bob gets confused sometimes,” Dennis said, the lie springing to him easy. “He must have forgotten I had that meeting at our West LA office and thought I’d gone home early.”
Carrie didn’t say anything. Dennis waited for a response, and when none came he rolled over on his right side, facing the wall. He waited until he heard the calm breathing of his wife sleeping beside him, and then he closed his eyes and tried to get some sleep himself. But it was a long time in coming.
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