After that, he'd noticed Dawn checking him out a lot and being very nice to him, especially when Chalice was out of the room. Even when, at a dorm party, he made a joke out of the incident, telling people how he had woken up to "the crack of Dawn" (of course leaving out the vibrator and all the rest of it) she hadn't minded and had laughed the loudest, commenting that it was the best dawn he'd ever see in his life.
As with every other girl he started to notice paying attention to him, Jackie wondered if she was attracted to him for himself or his notoriety. It was not a good thought to have; it was diseaselike, a chronic infection of a thought that would not go away. It spread to other people in his life, to Chalice, and he found himself asking the question more and more:
Is she with me because of what happened to me at Grimm Memorials?
She was, after all, a Goth and as such she was drawn to the macabre, the strange, the diabolical. On the other hand, they'd been dating for a month before she saw the Waters special and learned the bizarre truth about his past, so she had liked him prior to the TV broadcast. But, then, the night of the broadcast was the first night that she had agreed to spend the entire night with him. And their relationship had changed, become stronger, more intimate, after that night. There was no denying it. Was that a coincidence? So what? he rationalized. Is that a bad thing? There was a worrisome answer to that, too: Yes, it was a bad thing because it meant she was only infatuated with him and infatuation wears off. In Jackie's view of the ranking of emotions related to love, infatuation was barely a step above teenage crush and puppy love.
He wanted real, true love, and he wanted it with Chalice.
He wanted to talk to her about his feelings, but he couldn't. He laughed ruefully at himself thinking that with all the years of therapy and counseling he'd had he should be able to be open and sharing about his thoughts and feelings. So they went on as before, silently, physically expressing their love, but with too much left unsaid growing between them, until a few days before the Thanksgiving break when things became strained. Jackie had been acutely aware of the growing tension and distance between them and was waiting for the proverbial other shoe to fall in the form of Chalice losing interest in him as his fifteen minutes of fame faded, and thought that this trying period in their relationship was it. But she surprised him one night showing up at his dorm room after she'd told him she had too much studying to do to see him that night.
"I know I've been a bitch lately, and I'm sorry. It ain't you. The truth is, I don't want to go home for Thanksgiving," she blurted out, standing in his doorway. Jackie's roommate, Paul Taul, looked at her, adjusted his black plastic glasses, and went back to his reading. Jackie, who had been lying on his bed convincing himself that it was finally over between them, stood, and she ran into his arms.
"I don't wanna be away from you. I love you. I love you more than I've ever loved anyone or anything," she whispered in his ear.
At that moment, Jackie Nailer experienced the emotional zenith of his life. After a night of passionate lovemaking and softly spoken, heart-melting expressions of love, Jackie invited Chalice to come home with him for Thanksgiving break and she accepted. Later that day, he called his sister, Jen, and told her to expect one more for Turkey Day. Though he was wary of staying in the old Grimm house, he asked her if she could fix them up with a nice room for the weekend; even staying at the dreaded Grimm Memorials was preferable to dealing with the awkwardness of trying to stay at his mother's with Chalice. Jennifer was overjoyed at the prospect of more guests to entertain and said no problem; she'd have the best room in the place waiting for them.
Awareness ... of life ... the boy ... the past.
Once upon a ... candlestick?
Something is missing.
Faint at first-only sounds-but coming in waves, some clearer than others, like the steady tides of the oceans.
An ocean of thought. Washing over her. Pushing her under. Too weak to fight it.
Time flows; the waves subside.
Am I truly here? There is so much I cannot remember....
I used to know Mother Goose!
But what does that mean? She has no idea.
Part of me is missing....
Sensation-stirring her focusing her.
What is this?
Desire.
Oh, to feel again!
Pushing, trying to ... surface.
So close ...
The boy's thoughts are muffled and faint, as though she lived in a basement apartment and he on the third floorshe can hear him best when he is angry, excited, or afraid. Or when he is feeling something very strong, like his first orgasm. Feelings, physical and emotional, come through strongest; the strongest of all being the raw, hormonally charged, sexual ones.
She senses that feeling again, now. The boy is aroused, and conscious. As is she, sharing his arousal and gaining access to his conscious mind. In a moment of startling clarity, she senses a window of opportunity and opens it.
She decides to test her new awareness and, mustering all her strength, puts forth a thought, a communication, a suggestionan image-a scene from her past: Edmund letting three of his college friends rape her simultaneously.
Steve Nailer was getting undressed and thinking about the wet dream he'd had a week ago on Halloween night. He felt a stirring in his loins and pulled his undies down to find his penis semierect. Tentatively, he touched it and felt an immediate tingle of pleasure and an increase in the organ's hardness. From out of nowhere, an image, strong and clear, yet brief, filled his mind: a woman having sex with three men at the same time, one in her mouth, one in her vagina, and one in her backside. His member throbbed to such a hardness it was uncomfortable.
The image faded and he realized he was lying on his bed, penis in hand, stroking it. He knew what masturbation was, though he'd never performed it. He tackled it with relish now, recalling the image he'd just seen and reaching a climax almost instantly. As he cleaned himself with tissues and stuffed them deep into his wastebasket, he wondered if it was normal to feel so ... disappointed after.
At the moment before climax, she reaches the peak of awareness-everything, every thought in the boy's mind exposed to her-and a feeling of power. If she can just reach out and take control . . . but with the boy's quick-spent orgasm, the moment is gone.
Losing hold ... tossed back ...
Swimming against the waves ... going nowhere ...
There is something terribly wrong-
She tries to rise, but it is over. The moment is gone, the opportunity for control dissolved.
No!
She is shocked. She is incredulous. She is outraged!
This isn't the way it's supposed to be. This can't be all there is! I've waited so long for ... this? To exist as a floating thought, never to have life or physical sensation except through sharing the pitiful experiences of my host?
And one orgasm? What was-that? Is that it?Is that all? And not even a very powerful, enjoyable, or satisfying one.
Can that be all there is to a man's orgasm? Is every man's orgasm the same as this pitiful boy's? And if all men have such piss-poor orgasms, why the hell did I ever work so hard to become one?
She hopes it is only because of the boy's youth and newly awakened sexuality and that with time ...
She fondly remembers wave after wave of intense, exhilarating orgasms, one on top of another, until she thought her head would explode.
But that was when I was a woman-the little old woman who lived in a ... pumpkin? No ... that's not right..
It doesn't matter. Now I am a man.
I have a lot to get used to and a lot to do.
If only so much weren't missing....
Diane Nailer didn't want to go to Jen's for Thanksgiving, but she felt there was no way out of it; she'd been avoiding going there since Jen and her husband had moved in. Jen kept trying to get her to come by, telling Diane that she wouldn't even recognize the place as the old Grimm Memorials, they had renovated it so comple
tely.
Diane didn't doubt it. Though she had spent over twenty-four hours or so inside Grimm Memorials Funeral Home in the crematorium room at the mercy of Eleanor Grimm, she'd been unconscious most of that time and had almost no memory, outside of pictures she'd seen of the place after the fact, of what it looked like. She had just dreaded going there because of what she knew had happened there, not because of any prohibitive memory. She knew that after so many years she should no longer dread the place. She had explored this with her therapist, Dr. Gibbons, and had nearly convinced herself that the doctor was right-she had post-traumatic stress syndrome concerning the place, understandably so considering what had happened there.
But deep down, she had a nagging doubt that what happened to her at Grimm Memorials was only part of the reason why she was so afraid to return there. She supposed part of this feeling was brought on by the renewed media attention via the Barbra Waters show. For a week after the broadcast the phone had rung constantly whenever she'd plugged it in, hoping it would remain silent. One local reporter had even had the audacity to come to the front door and start harassing her with questions about what had happened. She'd had to call the police before Little Steve got home from the library with Mr. Gaste. .... ... ... . . . .
All in all it didn't matter what the reasons were why she didn't want to set foot in that house ever again. The most important was the same one she'd been living by for thirteen years-her need to protect Little Steve. And lately she'd started seeing hints that she had failed at that. Though she hated to admit it to herself, she was pretty sure he had either seen the Waters television show, or he had heard about it in detail from someone.
Honestly, she knew she was incapable of keeping the truth from him forever, especially not when it was on national television! She and Dr. Gibbons had discussed her need to talk to him and tell him the truth, but she just couldn't muster the courage to do it. Dr. Gibbons had suggested she do it over Thanksgiving atJen's house. That way Jackie and Jennifer could support her and help her tell the story and diffuse what could be a stressful and emotional situation. Finally, Diane gave in, ignored the warning voice of her woman's intuition, and agreed to do just that.
Work on the Magic Forest Bed-and-Breakfast went better than either Jennifer or Jeremy could have hoped. By the week before Thanksgiving they had three of the eight rooms on the third floor renovated, plus the main entrance hall and lobby, the dining room, living room, and kitchen on the first floor. Jen had directed the renovations, applying a Victorian-era decor that gave each of the rooms a similar theme without sacrificing individuality and that made the lobby and main dining room majestic. With Jackie and his girlfriend staying over, Jen was glad they had worked extra hard to get the rooms on the top floor done by Thanksgiving. Now, if she could just convince her mother and Little Steve to stay, she could put all three newly finished bedrooms to use for the first time.
Jen had never worked so hard in her life as she did in the first two months in the old Grimm place, and she'd never been so happy or felt so satisfied and fulfilled. She and Jeremy were like enraptured teenagers and she had no sense of any lurking problems or under-the-surface differences that could tear them apart. They were deeply in love and everyone around them noticed and got a sense of warmth at seeing two people so much so. Because of the Waters TV show, they had been fielding calls for reservations almost nonstop. With a projected opening of Halloween, next year, they were already booked through March of the year after that! Because of such a response, they'd had no trouble getting a loan from the bank when they decided to upgrade the renovations. Though her mother had no qualms about bankrolling their venture with money from the Grimm estate, since the TV showJen had felt guilty about using it. She hadn't really thought about it before the show made such a big deal out of it, but the money had been left to Little Steve and no one else. She just felt it was the right thing to do.
Jennifer was excited about having Thanksgiving at her house and spent the two weeks prior to the holiday cleaning and decking out the B&B in its best fall decorations. She and Mrs. Holcromb went on a baking frenzy and produced two dozen pies each of pumpkin, squash, mincemeat, blueberry, lemon meringue, and pecan. Half of those, Mrs. Holcromb took to O'Toole's General Store in Deerfield where they went for fifteen dollars apiece and were sold out several days before the holiday. With everything going so well-topped off by the fact that her mother and Little Steve were finally going to come Jen was convinced this was going to be the best Thanksgiving ever.
Time has no meaning; it does not exist. She floats in a river of psychic residue leaking from the hormonally charged brain of her teenaged host. But of late, the river has flow, direction. Though its pace is slow, instead of leaving her mired in stagnating pools of immaturity, the river now moves, taking her on a discovery tour of the many lands that make up the boy's psyche. She is buffeted by far echoes of the past and awash in hopes for the future, but, more importantly, she starts to feel and share every sensation, physical and emotional, the boy has. The bond between them grows stronger even as she struggles to stay afloat.
And the river flows faster... .
She must battle frustration and anger as much as the current of the boy's subconscious to remain at sea.
The effort is worth it.
Gradually, she develops a subtle influence over the boy... .
An interesting thing happens-her anger and frustration are reflected in the boy's mood and actions toward his mother, as if her emotions have seeped into his mind, supplanting his own.
It is the first step.
"Don't call me Little Steve anymore," Steve Nailer told his mother in mid-November. "It's embarrassing and I don't like it."
"But, honey," she replied, "I've always called you that. It's my little love name for you. It's special," she cooed, treating him again like a baby.
Suddenly he just couldn't stand it anymore. "Well, it sucks!" he shouted at her, the words exploding from his mouth along with strands of spittle flying in all directions as if anxious to escape the vehemence of his words. "It's stupid! It sounds gay and I'm not gay!" He fled the house, slamming the door behind him. He rode his bike as fast as he could away from the house, not caring in what direction he was headed. After several blocks he had to stop to catch his breath.
He had never been that angry before, had never lost his temper like that. Usually, he almost never got angry and honestly could not remember another time that he had lost his temper the way he had just now. And with his mother! He had never, ever gotten mad at her before. Annoyed, sometimes, but never mad at her. Even her pet name was really nothing more than an annoyance, so why did he blow up like that?
"Who cares?" he muttered, avoiding the uncomfortable question and trying to regain some of that righteous anger he had felt back at the house. "She thinks I'm still a baby." He felt an echo of the anger rising again and suddenly, like a hot flash from out of nowhere, came an overwhelming urge to commit violence. It was so powerful it both sickened and excited Steve. He got off his bike, letting it drop by the curbside, and staggered like a drunk into the yard of a grayshingled, Cape-style cottage. For a moment he had the strange sensation of feeling as if he were sitting in a very large, very dark theater, watching himself on a massive movie screen. Only, the him on the screen, walking across the yard, stopping and bending over to pick up a rock, wasn't him, but someone else, like an actor (only it was an actor who was his twin) playing him, or, more accurately-when the image occurred to him-like a lifelike, detailed marionette of himself moving only as the unseen puppeteer directed his strings.
And then the feeling was gone and he was fully aware of where he was, of the rock in his hand, of the curtained window not more than five feet away, and, over all, of the pressing urge to chuck the rock through the window. Even as he asked himself, Why am I doing this? he wound up and threw the missile. In the endless moment that it seemed to take for the rock projectile to traverse the space between him and the window, he got the answer in a de
licious sense of anticipation at seeing something smashed, destroyed, shattered. The very words thrilled him, and he leaned forward as if he expected waves of violence to reverberate outward from the breaking glass at the moment of impact.
An exquisite, heightened moment of almost ecstatic and sexually orgasmic anticipation, and the rock smashed through the window.
That sound! He fell to his knees, his hands clasped over his ears. That horrible sound, cutting him and making him weak.
A dog barking nearby brought him back to his feet. He looked around. It was a Monday morning. Most everyone in the neighborhood was off at work, including, apparently, the people who owned the house he'd just vandalized. He looked at the broken glass on the ground and winced at the memory of the pain the sound of it breaking had caused him.
Since when does the sound of breaking glass cause me pain? he worried. This sudden uncontrollable urge to do violence he'd just had scared him badly. It was just another strange thing he'd noticed lately about himself. Getting on his bike with a last guilty look around to see if anyone had seen what he'd done, he rode home as fast as he could, worrying every pedal of the way what was happening to him.
He knew puberty made boys go through changes, but he had never heard of anything like this. Was this normal? Even his sexual urges and dreams had been taking bizarre turns lately. They made his first nocturnal emission with the German shepherd seem tame. One in particular kept recurring and it disturbed the hell out of him. In the dream there was a naked child tied to a chair. It was a little boy. On a table next to the chair were laid out shiny, sharp, and pointed medical instruments. With growing excitement, grinding his hips into his mattress, he had watched his dream self pick up and use each of the deadly instruments in an unspeakable manner on the boy until he achieved an orgasm at exactly the same moment the dream child breathed his last and Steve twisted a scalpel deep inside him.
Grimm Reapings Page 6