by David Risen
“You see what you done? The boys’re gone, prob’ly dead. I’m dead and in hell. You ain’t nothing but a whore!”
Rider smirked.
Electricity shot through him again.
“No, you’re not in hell, not yet.”
Vinny turned and bolted for the archway leading to the bedrooms in the back of the house.
Rider grasped a fistful of oily, brown hair and snapped his head back.
Vinny fell to the floor with a thud – flopping like a fish out of water.
Rider turned and dragged Vinny out of the house, with the man screaming unintelligibly and clawing at the cuff of his leather jacket.
Rider hauled him down the three wooden steps from the front porch and stood just before an old, stone well in the front yard.
The abysmal spike formed in his right hand. He cocked it and stabbed the ground.
The ground rumbled and then a deep angry chasm opened in the front yard swallowing the old well.
That’s when he felt the arms of the eldest boy as he wrapped himself around Rider’s back.
“You leave my Pop alone. He’s right, the ole whore was just gettin what she had a’comin.”
The boy pounded his fist into Rider’s shoulders.
Rider ignored him and flung his father into the chasm.
He watched Vinny squirm and writhe as he plunged into the depths, and then he peered into the eldest child’s eyes, and he saw him for who he was.
Vinny rests his hand on the oval knob of a raised panel door, and presses his finger over his lips.
“But what if we get caught?” the boy whispers to his father.
Vinny smacks the side of his head and the boy winces.
“Ain’t nobody here ‘cept her, now keep your goddamn hole shut.”
Vinny twists the knob and opens the door.
Inside the dark room, lit only by the silver moonlight cascading in through the eight-pane window to the right of the bed, a girl lays beneath her quilts, her blond hair splayed out on the pillow like sunrays.
Vinny wastes, no time. He slips in the room, pulls a handkerchief from the pocket of his brown trousers, and gently ties it over her eyes, and in a sudden, swift motion he pins her hands to the pillows above her head.
The girl springs forward in sudden fright.
Vinny clasps her neck and shoves her head back down to the pillow leaning close.
“You’re gonna be quiet, and you ain’t gonna move until you hear the front door shut behind us. You got that, you little slut?”
She nods.
Vinny looks back at his eldest.
“Don’t just stand there a’lookin get the hell over here dumbass.”
“I don’t know,” the boy – Trevor – says.
Thunder claps behind Vinny’s eyes. “Her Daddy died in the Mines. Her Momma’s the town whore.... Little slut’s gotta learn to ply her trade sometime, and you need to learn to be a man.”
Trevor doesn’t move a muscle.
Vinny growls with dissatisfaction, releases her neck, flings the quilts back, and flips her nightgown up. The girl’s skin glows pale blue in the moonlight, and Trevor feels himself become aroused.
Vinny curls his fingers around the elastic of the girl’s white granny panties and rips them off like a dirty diaper.
The girl gasps and sobs.
Vinny grasps her neck. “Make any more noise, and you won’t be getting up outta this bed.”
Vinny looks back at Trevor. “Boy if you chicken out now, I’m gonna strangle her right in front of you. That what you wont?”
Trevor doesn’t reply one way or another. Vinny looks down at the girl.
“That what you wont?”
She shakes her head tightly. Vinny looks back up at Trevor.
“See, she’s practically beggin for you to come over here and stick it to her.”
Trevor sighs, and then he unbuckles his overalls.
Two weeks later, Trevor sits on the couch thumbing through a Sears and Roebuck catalogue with a drawing of a nude woman tucked between the pages when he hears his mother come up the porch steps.
He closes the catalogue and stuffs it under the couch just as she opens the door.
Gladys shuts the door behind herself and peels her white gloves off her hands, and the bolo hat decorated with a lily from her head. She tosses her gloves in her hat and sits them on the side table by the door.
“Where’s Wayne and Frankie?” she says.
“In the bedroom,” he responds.
“Wayne – Frankie?” she calls.
Trevor hears the smacking of small, bare feet against wooden floorboards. The two little guys appear in the archway between the den and the bedrooms.
“Mamma!” Frankie cries.
He bolts over to her and hugs her knees.
Gladys kneels, and looks at the two little boys. “I’ve got some really neat news for you. You want to go for a ride on a choo choo train?”
As his little brothers jump with excitement, Trevor rises to his feet.
“Momma?”
She gives him a weary look.
“Can I talk to you in the kitchen?”
She stands. “What’s wrong?”
He shakes his head. “Not in front of my brothers.”
She nods at Frankie and Wayne. “Go get your things. We’re going to spend the night with Granny and Pops and ride the choo choo.”
The little boys trot off to the back, and Gladys rises and gives him a weary look. Trevor steps into the kitchen by the scratched-up dining table. Gladys follows.
She stops before him and folds her arms.
“Yes?”
Trevor rises.
“What’s going on?”
She frowns. “We’re going to Granny and Pops’ house.”
“What about Pop?” he blurts.
She shrugs. “Well, he’s got his work. He doesn’t have time.”
Trevor gives her a shrewd look. “So he knows about all this?”
Gladys sighs and shuffles her feet. Then she licks her lips and looks up to the ceiling.
“I guess you’re old enough for me to give it to you straight.”
She looks at him and then away again. “Your Pop is a bad drunk. He beats you and your brothers, and he beats me. I’m not going to let it happen anymore.”
Something broke inside Trevor. Before he realized what he was doing, he slapped his mother to the ground. She gaped back up at him with surprise and hurt all over her face and blood dripping from the left corner of her mouth.
“Everything Pop said was true. You’re a whore, and you want to leave him for some whore-hopper who’s gonna throw me and my brothers on the trash heap!”
The morning of his demise, Trevor trails behind his brothers, as they meander out of the woods into the rocky clearing. He pulls himself along with a thick branch he found along the way that he repurposed into a walking stick.
“Not heir eitha?” he hears his three-year-old brother cry.
Trevor saunters out of the clearing to find his little brother standing with his arms folded and a dark look on his face.
Wayne, his middle brother tugs on his shirtsleeve. He looks down to find the little boy with his crazy mop of white blond hair looking up at him expectantly.
“Where else could she go?”
Trevor sighs with frustration.
“I don’t know. I need to think.”
Frank began low at first, but then he began to scream.
“I want my Momma!”
Trevor sprints across the clearing and claps his free hand over Frankie’s mouth.
“Quiet, idiot! You’re gonna attract bears and mountain lions.”
Frankie shoves Trevor’s hand away from his face and screams.
Trevor grinds his teeth, swings his makeshift walking stick like a baseball bat, and belts his little brother across the side of the head. The toddler falls to the ground flailing and kicking like a flea drowning in the sink.
“What did yo
u do?” Wayne screams.
Trevor turns and raises his stick.
“You want some, too?”
Father Fury glared into the boy’s eyes. The boy dangled over the chasm frozen in terror.
And Rider realized, at that moment, that the adolescent that he held by the upper halves of his arms was no boy at all, but a monster.
“No,” Gladys cried.
Father Fury looked back over his shoulder to find Gladys, still bleeding from the nose and mouth from her beating at the hands of her horrible husband, lying on her belly on the porch and reaching for Trevor.
“This one’s ruined,” Father Fury said.
“He’s a child,” she cried. “I can save him. He just needs love.”
Father Fury looked back at the boy and reaches deep within his spirit, and finds a well of hate, not just for his mother, but for all women everywhere.
Father Fury looked back at Gladys. “It’s too late for you to save him. He has to make the choice to change, and he’s not interested.”
“Let me try,” she begged.
Father Fury dug deep into the intentions of the mother, and he understood her. She didn’t leave Vinny because she knew that it would cost her Trevor.
The mother truly believed that she could save her son, but she couldn’t see inside him the way Father Fury could.
Father Fury smirked at the boy and sat him down by the chasm.
Trevor glared at his mother.
Father Fury felt rage boiling off him like an aura.
Trevor’s eyes found an old stump just before the porch with an axe jutting from the corner of it, and then he glowered at his mother once more.
Trevor roared and charged toward the axe.
Father Fury grasped him by the collar and reeled him back in, and then he lifted the boy over his head and hurled him into the chasm.
Gladys shrieked with grief.
The chasm closed, and Rider turned back to face her – his eyes still glowing red.
“What are you?” Gladys shuddered.
Rider chose not to answer.
“Are you the devil?” she pressed.
Rider grinned. “No.”
“Why?” she cried.
At that moment, the two small children Wayne and Frankie trotted up the steps to the porch and covered their mother.
Rider nodded to himself. “You have two choices. You can either follow the other half of your family to hell and drag the two little ones with you – which none of you deserve, or you can move on to your version of heaven where you will finally know peace and happiness.”
“He was my child,” she insisted.
Rider shook his head slowly. “Your husband killed the little boy you knew and replaced him with a monster. A few thousand years in hell will cool him off a little.”
Gladys’s eyes bulged. “I can see again,” she said.
Rider nodded. “The rest of this is up to you. Make the right choice.” Then he turned and started back for the cabin.
Yamile and Gloria cry like toddlers as they build the fire in the barbeque pit. The other women sit at a picnic table that they pulled out of the gazebo staring at the thick sticks they gathered catatonically.
Lucifer steps over to the barbeque pit and places his hand on the surface, and recoils.
“That’s hot enough.”
Yamile and Gloria stop throwing wood in the fire.
Lucifer smiles at them.
“You’ve done well, girls. Now go ahead and take off your clothes.”
The women begin bawling harder as their bodies comply with the devil’s commands. They strip off their jackets, and then their shirts.
“What are you going to make them do?” Roxanne snaps.
Lucifer looks at her and holds up his index finger.
“Ah, thanks for reminding me. In ancient Greece, a designer by the name of Perillos came up with a very interesting form of capital punishment and torture that he called the Brazen Bull. It was a much more elegant device than this with pipes built into it designed to turn the screams of those being cooked to death within into a sound not unlike that of a bull. This barbeque pit will do, though. But I’m sure the sounds your sisters are about to make will be quite unnerving.”
“¡No deseo morir!” Yamile cried.
Lucifer eyes her to find both women, Gloria and Yamile standing by the barbeque pit wearing only bras and panties.
He furls his brow. “Did I stutter? I said take off all your clothes.”
With trembling hands, Yamile and Gloria unfasten their bras and slip off their panties.
Lucifer smiles and nods with satisfaction.
“Allow me to educate you on the truthfulness of some other religions. First, no religion in the world is wrong, but none of them hold the monopoly on truth, either. The rhadamanthine judgement of men calling themselves prophets corrupted most of them, but all of them are built on pillars of truth. The doctrine of Karma in Hinduism and Buddhism is true. Whatever you put out comes back to you in droves. If you don’t pay for it here in mortality, which is a blessing in and of itself, you will pay for it in the afterlife.”
He looks back at Yamile and Gloria. “Believe it or not, I’m doing you a favor by providing you the opportunity to pay for some of it now. Of course, no amount of mortal suffering will square the books for either of you at this point, but it will provide for much less of a hell.”
Lucifer eyes the other women. “Death has no dominion, and hell is usually not forever. Don’t fret for yourselves.”
Lucifer turns to Yamile and Gloria. “Well, I could go on forever about my favorite forms of torture, but time comes at a premium today. If you ladies don’t mind, or even if you do, please just go ahead and hop in.”
Yamile cries and begs even as her body complies with its master’s command. She raises the door on the barbeque pit and climbs inside. The skin of her flesh sizzles as her back meets with the rack inside, and she shrieks.
Gloria followed, and Lucifer closed the lid.
The acrid smell of burning flesh and the blood curdling screams from inside the barbeque pit were enough to make Amelia want to throw up, but she has no body.
The other women cringe with each sound.
Lucifer walks around the picnic table and claps his hands together.
“Let’s move on, shall we?”
He scans the three remaining sisters sitting at the table looking terrified into a catatonia. Their heads and hands shake as if they are freezing.
“Marianne Weathers, c’mon down.”
The short girl with the emo black hair and pale skin with the black leather jacket and Nirvana tee shirt stands. Her motions, as she approaches, are jerky and distorted as if she is fighting. She cries like a baby as soon as Lucifer calls her name.
She stops two steps before him covering her face with her hands.
Lucifer steps past her and takes the six-foot stick that she sharpened into a spear from the table, and then he stands before her again.
“What’s with the tears? You should be happy. You’re about to pay for a lot of your transgressions right here.”
“Fuck you,” she half-screams.
Lucifer wags his head from side to side. “No thank you. I’d be afraid of what diseases I might get; besides, all the extra-marital sex is what landed you in this jackpot.”
She glares at him, and Lucifer turns his back obliviously, and then he turns back around and faces the two remaining women.
“Sex is more sacred than anyone can ever know, but not for the reasons humanity names. It’s the only means through which we can both physically and spiritually connect with another person. Does divinity care about marriages? Not particularly. One can have sex with another without marrying, but to do so, the intentions of both individuals must be clean. If they are not, you are both defiling yourselves. Which is why Yeshua taught the children to stay away from sex outside of wedlock.”
Lucifer looks back at Marianne.
“But you know that sp
iritually, don’t you? In fact, you’ve made quite a hobby out of defiling yourself.”
Lucifer peers at the other women.
“I’ve done a fine job of helping people to believe that it’s hip to have sexual relations with as many people as you see fit, and I’ve also done a fair job of convincing over half of them that there’s nothing spiritually wrong with eradicating the pregnancy when such a thing happens accidentally.”
He gives Marianne a stern look of disapproval.
“Now, if you’d be so kind as to remove your jeans and your panties?”
“Please don’t,” she begs but even as she does so, she unbuckles her black biker boots and kicks them off.
Lucifer shakes his head tightly.
“I don’t know why you’re making such a big deal out of it. You don’t wear pants half the time anyway.”
He gapes back at the two other women.
“Ursula, why don’t you grab your stick and join us up here? You can go ahead and take off your jeans and panties, too.”
Ursula stands, grasps her stick and stands to the right of Marianne who is just kicking her panties off her right leg.
Lucifer looks back at the only remaining sister sitting at the table.
“One of my favorite forms of cruel and unusual capital punishment is impaling. There are many ways to impale a person. My favorite of all time is the method of the man you may have heard of before. History calls him Vlad Tepes or Vlad the Impaler.
“He was known to his contemporaries as Vlad Dracula which in old Slavic means “Son of the Devil. I’ll assure you he was not. I’m a one-woman kind of guy, but I wouldn’t be ashamed of him.
“He would plant a two-and-a-half-inch post into the ground sharpened at the tip and lubricate it. Then he would force the condemned to disrobe and sit on top of the spike allowing it to slowly work its way through the body.
“Of course, time is of the essence, so this afternoon, we will be employing a quicker and more tribal rendition of this method.”
Lucifer looks back at Marianne holding the post like a staff.
“If you please, turn around and face your friend, Roxanne.”
Marianne turns at once like a soldier doing an about face, crying uncontrollably.
Lucifer holds up his finger. “I don’t recommend anyone try this. I can do this perfectly in one stroke, but men would have to use mallets.”