by Carver Pike
During that time, I did my best to live life. I didn’t use the tattoo machines. I’d forgotten them in the trunk until the one time I got a flat tire and opened it up to get the spare. So I carried all of our equipment up to the apartment and stored it in a closet. I couldn’t tattoo without my brother. It didn’t seem right. Instead, I drew.
Nikki was nowhere to be found while Ivory was in the slammer. Believe me, I tried to track her down. I thought if she went to visit him, she might be able to lift his spirits. She might be able to get him to see me again. I knew he wasn’t angry at me and he probably didn’t even blame me. He just liked to deal with things on his own and seeing me all the time probably wasn’t making it any easier. I hoped that was it because it broke my heart to think my brother might not like me anymore.
I used to lie in bed at night, comfortable and warm, and imagine Ivory shivering on a mattress with no blanket or pillow. I’m sure it wasn’t like that on the inside, but I worried about what he might be going through for me.
He always took care of me. Yet, I couldn’t take care of him.
Chapter 3 – Simple Simon
Dead bugs. Dead animals. Dead husbands. Dead wives. Dead upbringings. Dead dreams. Death is the only thing certain. I’m a bringer of death so you might say I’m the bringer of certainty. I can barely remember a life before the darkness.
Nobody noticed the change in me. If they did, they didn’t say anything. I think they always saw me as stupid, as below them, as not having the smarts they did.
“Kill them all,” the little boy, Samuel, whispered in my ear.
His voice terrified me. The way he’d sound innocent and playful like any other child one moment and then would scream and curse the next. The fear was constant. At night, as the demons surrounded my bed, I trembled and wet myself. Mrs. Rebecca assumed I had a problem pissing my bed. James helped me flip my mattress sometimes but those other motherfuckers, the others made fun of me. They pointed at me and whispered things. I wanted to kill them all.
I remember wishing that Mrs. Rebecca would hold me and comfort me and remind me that I was important. She did things with all the boys in the house, but I wanted more. I wanted to know that everything would be okay. She was so busy fucking all the young boys that she didn’t even realize I was suffering inside. She didn’t see it. When I needed her most, she wasn’t there for me. Nobody was.
Of all the kids who’d entered our house, Nikki was the only one to refuse Mrs. Rebecca. She didn’t only refuse, she ran away. Her disappearance led to total destruction. I remember it clearly. James and Nikki were taken into the bedroom together. I was jealous at first. Not so much because I knew they’d be fucking in a few minutes. That’s what always went on in that bedroom. It started with fondling, I knew that, but it always turned into something much more. The thought of anything sexual involving Nikki turned me on. Masturbation was a nightly ritual for me. As it would be this night.
Hag was the horniest of the demons. The old lady with the horrific crown gummed her way through disgusting cat calls and sexually discriminatory threats and gestures.
“Sneak into her bedroom at night and come on her tits,” she told me once. “Wait till she snores and put your cock in her mouth.”
Even then, at such a young age, I knew the things she said were wrong. Hag never threatened me with violence the way Samuel and Rotten and Putrid did. They threatened me all day and all night. Sometimes to the point that I couldn’t think straight. I only wanted them out of my head long enough so I could compose a normal thought. Migraines often accompany their rants. A young boy needs alone time. He needs to be able to fantasize and with Nikki always nearby, I needed to dream more than most.
I masturbated in the bathroom as it seemed to be the only place the demons would leave me alone. I thought of Nikki’s bare tits the one time I accidentally walked into the bathroom as she was getting out of the shower. I didn’t see her pussy but I knew it would be slightly hairy and that turned me on. Yes, I was going to jack my dick that night with thoughts of Nikki, and thoughts of what Mrs. Rebecca was going to make James and Nikki do.
Then she ran out of the bedroom in tears, grabbed her backpack, and fled. Why couldn’t she have played along like everyone else? Her selfish, fleeing ways led to a barrage of problems. James ran after her. He was gone for a long time. The rest of us sat in silence in front of the TV. Mrs. Rebecca never left her bedroom. Maybe she sensed what was to come.
When James returned, he wasn’t alone. He’d brought the cops. He told them everything. He left out no details. I tried to clean up his mess and deny the accusations. I didn’t want to see Mrs. Rebecca hurt. I loved her, but my love couldn’t save her. She was doomed and as her ship sank, we were all dragged down with her.
Cops, investigators, social workers…they all came to see us. They asked me questions and I wanted so badly to tell them about the demons, about the Midnight Man, and all the other sick shit that was plaguing me, but I knew nobody would listen. The demons dared me to tell them. They knew nobody would care. The authorities only wanted to hear about the kinky stuff that went on in the bedroom.
Eventually there was nothing left to see. Our house was in ruins. Newspapers made sure the neighborhood, the city, and the rest of the world knew the secrets behind the walls of the “Foster Fondler.” That’s what the newspapers dubbed her. It was a horrible name, as so much else happened in that house. Good things happened. Love happened. Life happened. Ultimately…death happened.
Mrs. Rebecca was a monster in the world’s eyes. A monster can’t have access to children. So I suffered.
Perhaps that’s when I began to break things. Some people dismantle cars or pick apart computers or pull apart fabric, all with the intention of putting it back together again. Not me. I had no intention of ever putting anything back together again. Like my home, it all deserved to be ripped apart.
Have you ever pulled the wings off a fly and watched it move around as if it has no fucking clue why it’s in great pain and can no longer fly? It’s fascinating. Have you ever poured bleach onto a worm or salt over a slug? Have you ever kicked a cat simply to see if it would still land on its feet? I wish I could say I got great joy out of those things. I wish I could say that it silenced the demons. I think that’s what I was seeking at first. Happiness would never come. I understood that. But silence. Silence was something I could seek out. It was a deal I could make with the demons. If I gave them blood, maybe they would give me silence. I thought breaking a puppy’s neck would work. It didn’t. Nothing did.
The demons visited the night before my first murder. Rotten crept so close to my face that I could smell his rank breath. It stunk of sulfur and vinegar, a sick cocktail of the raunchiest of stenches wafted up my nose. I did my best to hold my breath but it was too late and the demon cackled as I projectile vomited at its face. It should have settled on its chin but instead it sizzled as the heat of the demon’s skin fried my puke.
Without saying a single word, I heard its voice in my head.
“Kill tomorrow or you will suffer a worse pain than last time.”
By last time, he meant the week before when I’d been threatened like this, told to kill someone and had refused. Until then I’d stuck to slaughtering stray cats and sacrificing chickens. When the demon told me to kill someone, I went out to a farmer’s field and shoved a hunting knife into a cow’s belly. With blood soaked hands, I flicked the fluid into the air all around me and begged the demons to let that be enough. I begged them for silence.
Instead, they struck me down. Invisible lightning hit my palms and the tops of my feet. My body rose up into the air as if I was being abducted by a UFO and then from maybe twenty feet up my body was slammed down on my back against the grass where I felt bolted into the earth. No blades struck me but I felt the cold, sharp steel drive through my limbs and then twist around. An unseen Rottweiler gnawed at my stomach and tore at my intestines. My screams echoed through the air but did nothing to ease the pain.
The demons tortured me that night and when I woke the next morning, still there in the field, I knew that I could never deny them again.
So this time, when the demon told me I would kill, I knew I would. Who I would kill was the mystery. I wished no one in particular any ill will. I disliked the woman who often served me coffee. Mostly because she reminded me of a girl I once had a crush on. A girl who served me coffee in college but refused to go out with me when I asked her. My new barista wasn’t as pretty as my college crush and she had twice the attitude. But I didn’t think she needed to die. A visit to my old middle school could be an easy way to turn up some potential victims. I hated most of my childhood teachers. I could search out some of the young boys who’d fucked Mrs. Rebecca. Did those boys deserve to die?
All I wanted was silence. In truth, nobody deserved to die. But I did deserve silence and I definitely didn’t deserve to find myself tortured in a field again.
The silence came with the Mumbler. He was a homeless man who wasn’t old enough to have served in Vietnam and didn’t look young enough to have served in any of the more recent wars. He was a tortured soul with some sort of mental sickness that kept him shouting at the heavens and kicking soda cans around the block. The Mumbler’s hair hung to his shoulders and his white skin was so sunburnt that he nearly looked Native American. He’d done nothing wrong. Mumbling wasn’t a crime and in some ways I felt connected to the man. Like me, his mind wasn’t right.
Killing him wasn’t something I’d decided in advance. No, I’d had no intention of ending the man’s life. Midnight was coming quickly and I knew if I didn’t give the demons the blood they wanted, I may not live to see the morning. Samuel was in my ear the whole time, whispering.
“Do it,” the little boy said. “Bathe in their blood. Savor the sweet tang of it on your lips. Kill them all.”
I’d stepped into a convenience store to buy a pack of razors and a gallon of vodka. If the demons wanted blood, I’d give it to them. They could no longer torture me if I took my own life. So that’s what I was going to do. I walked around to the back of the store and found a shadowy spot in the parking lot, beneath a tree, to get sloppy drunk and slit my wrists.
“Do it,” Samuel whispered. “Fucking do it.”
“I will,” I said proudly, wondering if he knew what it was I was promising to do.
“Do it,” he whispered again.
“You’re making this easier,” I warned him.
“Then do it,” he whispered.
Silence.
“AND WATCH THE FUCKING BLOOD RUN!”
I jumped and nearly dropped my bottle of vodka. I hated when the demons did that. They whispered most of the time, or spoke very quietly in my ear, but every once in a while they’d shout at me and scare the shit out of me. Samuel had begun doing it more and more. I think he got off on frightening me. It was the worst when I was asleep and woke to the sound of one of them screaming at me.
“I’m thirsty,” came a strange voice from the other side of the tree, deeper in the shadows from where I was sitting. “Spare some of that?”
I backed away from him and into one of the parking lot lamps.
“Who’s there?” I asked.
“A thirsty man,” the voice said.
As I stepped closer, he did the same, and I saw that it was the Mumbler.
“Do it,” Samuel whispered.
I closed my eyes for a second, trying to decide whether to hand him the bottle or take off running. With my eyes closed, I was momentarily transported back to that dark world with Samuel on the cross, lightning striking all around him, and his voice yelling at me over the sound of the thunder.
“Kill him!” he yelled. “Kill him for me! Kill him for us! Kill him for yourself!”
Samuel laughed hysterically, maniacally, like a hyena in a child’s voice.
Back in the real world, the Mumbler reached for my bottle of vodka. He snatched it away before I had the chance to pull it back. Without another word, he twisted off the cap and lifted the bottle to his mouth. He chugged the clear liquid the way a kid might swig Kool-Aid. He gulped it down like Gatorade after a sprinter’s race. He was thirsty but the demons were famished and they required his blood.
I was drawn to his Adam’s apple as it moved up and down with each swallow. The razorblade box slid open in my hand and before I realized what I was doing, my fingers pinched both sides of a blade and as he took his final draw, preparing to stop drinking and hand the bottle back, my hand shot out and the blade swiped at his throat, splitting open the skin and spilling his blood down his neck and chest and body.
The bottle crashed onto the leaf littered lawn beneath the tree and didn’t shatter but sank into the soil. His mouth remained open in mid-swig while his eyes shot open in frozen terror. I remember smiling for the first time in a long time. Watching his confusion was satisfying to me. I liked the way he searched for understanding and even reached out to me with open hands as if expecting me to save his life. Like I was going to close his wound and keep him comfortable until an ambulance came. As his hands grew close to me, I slapped them out of my way and laughed.
The demons laughed. Samuel applauded. Hag cheered. Rotten cackled. Putrid chomped his nasty teeth close to my ear and told me I’d done a great job. Laughter filled both my ears as somewhere in some hidden universe a crowd of creatures clapped and cheered. The demons were proud and I was proud that I’d made them proud. The Mumbler fell to the ground and crawled toward the parking lot but I grabbed both of his sneaker covered feet and yanked back, dragging him into the shadows where I climbed onto his back and used the razor to slice open the back of his neck too.
Then I grabbed a second blade. I double fisted my weapons as I rained down violent slashes at his back and shoulders and arms while I laughed. I never stopped laughing. Nobody would hear me. Nobody ventured into the back of a convenience store. No one had any reason to be back here until the store employee left at the end of his shift, probably sometime in the morning. So I took my time and I enjoyed the silence that came after.
Chapter 4 – Kevin
Ivory plagued my thoughts at all hours, and my nephew was my other concern while he was locked up. He was a young boy without a father, and his mother had no idea what she was doing. She tried. She was a good woman. She was a gorgeous woman too, the perfect wife for my brother. When we’d gone to pick up the tattoo machines that day, Ivory told me how much he loved her. That he wanted to marry her and open up a shop so he could take care of his family the way they deserved to be taken care of.
He wanted to build the family that we never had. Uncle Kevin he used to call me sometimes. I liked the sound of that. Ivory was proud that he’d made me an uncle. The problem was, Ivory was always more in love with Melanie than she was with him. At least that’s what I think.
She’d been a stripper when Ivory first met her. The night they first hooked up was my birthday. Ivory wanted to take me out and show me a good time. He wanted me to get laid. For some reason that translated to “let’s go watch naked women dance.” I wasn’t into paying a prostitute so I wasn’t sure how his plan was going to end with me having sex, but he seemed to be having a good time so I went along with whatever he wanted.
Plus, I knew he was a bit shaken up. He’d recently bumped into Nikki, his childhood sweetheart and a girl we both loved like a sister. There’d always been a little something more between Ivory and her. He told me he’d seen her the night before and he knew she’d felt the spark too, but she was engaged to get married. She’d met some rich dude and was blinded by his money and charms. Ivory was clearly jealous and wanted to do whatever he could to get Nikki off his mind. So we went to The Racing Stripe, a cheap stripper bar with beautiful women, named after the pubic hair trim sometimes referred to as a landing strip.
Melanie was serving drinks when we first saw her. She had on tight leather shorts and a top that had a great viewing window right between her boobs. Her long black hair hung down over her shoulders, strai
ght and shimmering, like a chandelier of silk. She blinked a lot, something that Ivory probably didn’t notice, and I wondered if her contact lenses were bothering her.
Sometimes I notice strange things like that. I once stopped a girl in our neighborhood from getting molested because I noticed a strange man was taking pictures of the playground, always seeming to focus on her. I told a nearby police officer and when they approached the man, it turned out he was wanted for child molestation. His camera was full of only pictures of that little girl.
“Holy shit,” Ivory said as he gripped my shoulder and pointed in the beautiful waitress’s direction. “That’s her.”
“Th…that’s who?” I asked.
“The girl I want,” he said.
When Ivory wanted something, he did his best to go after it. He didn’t always succeed, but he never failed to try. After five or six drinks and two lap dances later, Ivory put his hands on her during a lap dance. He’s always claimed she told him it was okay, but the bouncer apparently felt differently about it. We were asked not so politely to leave. So we sat in our car and waited for Melanie to come out. They went home, I suppose they fucked, and they started a serious relationship. She stopped stripping and went into regular waitressing instead.
A few months later, Melanie was pregnant. Then Brandon was born and the rest is history. Ivory got arrested and it all went to shit. Melanie was too gorgeous to sit around and wait for a man to serve his prison sentence. I visited them for a while. She even let me take Brandon to the movies and to the park a few times.
I knew she needed to go far away when I was at the apartment one night watching movies with Brandon. Melanie and I were drinking a little bit, and Brandon eventually fell asleep watching some kind of animated movie we’d rented. At some point, Melanie had made her way closer to me on the couch and was leaned over me running her hand through Brandon’s hair when her hand moved back and settled on my thigh.