Stepping inside, her heels clicked on tile as Jerry followed, and he noticed what she'd meant by "the mess" right away. End tables and glass vases and the corners of walls had been smothered in bubble wrap and clear tape. The sofa, the fabric on the dining room chairs... it was almost as if she'd been attempting to seal off anything of value. To protect it from the incessant gnawing of some feral animal, maybe: a miniature hell hound in a fancy dog sweater. Or to spare them from being humped.
The woman ushered Jerry past all of this to the kitchen, where she indicated with an elegant swishing gesture the knives laid out on the counter. "You see?"
"Oh, they're dull, all right," Jerry said, clucking his disapproval. "I can help with that."
Jerry looked around himself at the counter island stools, the appliances, and the windows all taped over with bubble wrap. Even her fancy kitchen gadgets had been wrapped neatly in bloated clear plastic. It reminded Jerry of the padded cell they had put him in when he was still a boy. The hefty tool in his hands no longer made him feel strong. He felt uneasy. He felt that stabbing pain in his stomach again.
"Moving, are you?" he ventured, and licked the roof of his suddenly dry mouth.
The woman shook her head and offered nothing further.
Jerry gestured to a stool. "May I?"
"Be my guest," she said, then smirked as if her words had amused her.
Jerry dragged a stool to the counter, where he'd laid down his grinder. The layers of bubble wrap squeaked as he sat, the sound of a clown twisting balloons. He thought maybe the woman might not have wanted his sharpening equipment to damage anything in the kitchen, but it wouldn't explain why she'd wrapped the rest of the house. Thinking about it set his teeth grinding. Best to get this done, then--the whole nasty, messy business--and be out of here quickly.
But once Jerry got started, he savored the grinding and the sparks that were always a prelude to the work ahead. Gradually, his anxieties floated away. While he sharpened her knives, he drank little sips of the woman as she crossed and uncrossed her long legs from her perch on a second bubble-wrapped stool, smoothing down her lipstick-red nails with a pointed nail file.
Aside from her height and her hair color, this woman looked nothing like Sandra. Sandra had been street trash. Jerry's father had met her at a bar after a long day, and judging by the stories she'd told to anyone who would listen, Jerry Sr.'s truck had been bouncing on its springs in the back lot within the hour. This woman had an elegance about her. A fragility that Sandra, who chain-smoked and spat and scratched her genitals in public, never had. Sandra wore Press-On nails, much longer than anyone needed, and all of Sandra's clothes had been form-fitting, to show off her hips and the roundness of her buttocks. And while the eyes of both women were blue, Sandra's had been cold and calculating. This woman's were soft. Kind. Sandra's whorishly painted lips had always twisted down, even when she'd been smiling. This woman's lips curled up at the corners, giving her the appearance of a smile even when she was frustrated.
Sandra was long dead now, murdered by Jerry's own hands. She'd moved into the house and into his father's bed barely a year after they had laid Jerry's mother in the ground. Sandra had toyed with young Jerry, both awakening and deterring his sexuality. The night she'd caught him masturbating at age twelve, Sandra had made him painfully aware of how small his penis was: "Stroking his little prick!" she'd called out to his father. Both father and son had been too mortified to look each other in the eye for days, though by then Jerry Sr. paid little attention to him anyhow, so enamored was he with his young new girlfriend.
And when he was thirteen, Jerry had heard his father grunting in the master bedroom. He had peeked in through a crack in the door to find his father lying face-down on the bed, his hairy ass in the air. The room smelled foul, like a soiled diaper. Sandra stood behind his father, her naked buttocks jiggling between the leather straps of some device, thrusting her hips toward Jerry Sr., grinding her hairy crotch--he could see the thick black thatch of her pubic hair between her legs--into his father's backside. Sandra's fleshy pink phallus--a dildo, Jerry knew now, though at the time he'd thought he understood why Sandra had mocked his penis, when her own penis was so large--plunged into his father's rectum and out, in and out, while his father grunted in pain and pleasure.
Cautiously, quietly, young Jerry had moved downstairs to the kitchen, ashamed by his erection, his young mind swimming with rage, jealousy, revenge. He opened the top drawer closest the sink, where the knife his mother had used to kill herself still lay, though cleaned, sharpened and unused since. He removed it from the drawer and crept back upstairs. He sneaked into the room as his father raised up on his knees and Sandra pulled on his father's hair like the reigns of a horse, his father's prick squirting milky fluid onto the fouled sheets.
Jerry Sr. had caught his eye just as Jerry brought the knife across Sandra's exposed throat. The mortification in his father's eyes could have been embarrassment of the act his son had caught him in as much as terror. Jerry would never know. As Sandra fell back, gurgling and clawing at her throat as gouts of blood spattered him and his father, the dildo popped out of his father's shit-smeared asshole with a wet plop and Jerry Sr. fell onto the soiled mattress.
Jerry had fallen upon him in an instant, the blade plunging in and out of him as the dildo had only moments before. His father's grunts were not of pleasure then, only pain. Sandra clawed the curtains down from the rod, the bright light of day cascading down on this grizzly scene. The smell of shit and blood had been so thick, Jerry's heart hammering so fast, that the world began to gray.
When Jerry awoke, he'd been in a padded off-white room. His father, dead. Sandra, dead. The police hadn't wanted to go into details of how they'd been found--the embarrassment had been as plain on their faces as it had on his father's--but it was clear they knew that he'd been the culprit. He'd spent the rest of his childhood in the institution, released to a halfway house the year he turned eighteen. With good behavior, he'd eventually been allowed to return home. Since his father had been good about paying his bills, the house and truck now belonged to Jerry.
Finally, Jerry completed his work. He wiped his greasy fingers on a handkerchief and took his receipt book from the deep front pocket of his coveralls.
"That was quick," the blonde woman said, something she might be moved to say again later, though by then she would have neither the strength nor the breath--perhaps not even the lips--to voice the remark.
Jerry smiled his practiced smile. "May I ask... what your name is?" He wouldn't look up at her, intent on the pen scrawling on his pad. "For the bill," he added hastily.
All he required was her signature. Proof that she wasn't Sandra, that more blades needed sharpening, more work required doing.
One day, when there were no more Sandras left to skewer, he would reveal his dark Other to the world. His shadow self was gargantuan--it stretched out dark and monstrous behind him, particularly in the late afternoon. Jerry preferred to kill a few hours after lunchtime, so his shadow would draw out long behind him when he left his victims, a dark mirror to the giant inside.
When there were no more Sandras, the world would see just how BIG he was, so BIG their minds would struggle to see him all... and in their fear, and in their desperation, they would put him away for the rest of his life, with no chance of parole.
Over the years, lonely women would write to him in prison. They would proclaim his innocence, profess their love, send him their silky underwear, fragrant with their scent. They would worship him. Jerry The Giant, his minions would call him. Jerry the Juggernaut.
"I'm Rose Stark," his next victim said, picking up one of the blades and admiring its shiny edge under the florescent lights. He wanted to suck the fluid from her windpipe and use it as a flute. He wanted to sever her pelvis and use it as a sex toy. But he wouldn't do these things. Even when fully absorbed in his Other self, Jerry was no animal. He would only cut her major arteries, slowly and methodically, and let her pumping
hot lifeblood be the lubricant to their sexual congress as he worked his little prick into her anus.
Out in the street, the bell in his father's truck tinkled softly.
"Oh, this is perfect," the woman--Rose--said, rotating the shiny-edged blade in her hand.
"Sharp," Jerry agreed, nodding hypnotically.
Behind her back, Jerry tugged his mother's kitchen knife--not the same knife, that was in a moldering evidence box at the police station, but its double, the same heft and blade--out of the homemade sheath in his coveralls.
As he brought the knife up, its shiny blade shimmering under the recessed lighting, Rose shrugged the flimsy dress from her shoulders. Its fabric caught for one loving moment on her hips, and she shimmied slightly, her taut breasts jostling before she slipped free of it, and it finally cascaded down to her ankles. She turned to him, naked and proud, though her body was not without its flaws. Her flesh was blemished with dozens of scars, paler than the rest of her: little inch-long nicks crisscrossing her hips, her legs, her breasts, her arms. He hadn't noticed them in the daylight, and though they were certainly odd, it didn't diminish Jerry's lust for her.
He swallowed hard. Everything about him felt hard, suddenly. No woman had come on to him before, aside from Sandra, who had used her sexuality like a carrot on a stick, flaunting her curves and taunting him, practically forcing him to strike out at her one way or the other.
This woman, Rose, she drew out her arms and bid him closer.
Jerry felt his mother's knife fall uselessly from his hand. The sound of its clatter on the tiles seemed far away, dulled by the pleasant thud of his own blood in his ears as he shuffled toward her, like a child taking his first steps to his mother.
Rose took him into a warm embrace. She drew his face to her bosom and cupped his head in her hand, stroking his greasy, shaggy hair. Jerry stood in her arms, pressed between her firm breasts, her heartbeat enveloping him the way his mother's once had when he was a boy. Tears welled up in his eyes, and he wept openly. She stroked his hair, shushing him, letting him weep, letting his tears smear on her breasts and drip down her belly.
"It's okay," she cooed. "It's okay."
And it was okay, Jerry realized. Suddenly nothing seemed to matter. The past was the past. Sandra, his father and mother were dead and buried. Her suicide and their murder, the abuses he'd suffered in the asylum in the years that followed their deaths, were nothing more than vague memories of someone else's bad dream. Jerry felt at peace, for the first time since he'd found his mother in the blossoming pool of blood on the kitchen tiles. He felt very small, a child in his mother's arms, and it was okay to be small.
It was okay.
Jerry heard a familiar sound like knives drawn across leather straps, only this was the sound of dozens simultaneously. As his mind processed this, he felt his flesh opening at his throat, his cheek, his chest, belly, arms and groin. Peeling open an eye, the one not pressed against this woman's hot flesh, he blinked away tears and got a good look at the breasts he'd been snuggling against. Only what he saw wasn't a breast at all... or, not quite. The flesh had parted, and from the nipple a long, sharp, ridged thing jutted out like a horn, slick with her blood.
Rose had grown thorns.
Terrified, Jerry squirmed, tearing his own flesh against her spiky protrusions. The more he wormed against her the more entangled he became. She held him close, shushing him, whispering It's okay, it's okay, and the thorn in his cheek popped through with a sound like the dildo springing from his father's anus, and it gouged the roof of his mouth, his tongue. The thorns in his abdomen and crotch had flayed him, his guts fell out like sauced spaghetti and his penis--just as small as Sandra had declared it--had been skewered like a cocktail weenie on a toothpick.
Jerry opened his mouth to speak, but the word gurgled out on a mouthful of blood. His heart stopped pumping, his limbs slackened, and his head dropped to the side, like a marionette on severed strings.
Rose let him go then. His lifeless body slipped from her sharp protrusions and fell to the floor in a bloody heap beside his grinder. And as her breathing slowed, Rose waited for the change to happen.
They came to her like flies to the spider, like moths to the flame: these monsters dressed as men, rotten little boys who still feared their mothers, their sisters, daughters and wives. Unconsciously they sought her out, and Rose held them and pacified them. Often she sang to them and often they prayed, and sometimes she slapped them and sometimes she let them suck and bite her at her nipples and once or twice, they had kissed. But always, always, she stroked their hair and told them it was okay. Because in the end it was all these monsters wanted: someone to comfort them and tell them they were forgiven.
The thorns drew back inside her with an epileptic shuddering. Already the flesh that covered them began to heal, and she wet a bunch of paper towels in the sink and daubed away the blood before stepping back into her dress, pulling it back up over the lightening dimples on her shoulders.
Rose opened the fridge, poured herself some lemonade, and brought it to the front porch, basking in the satisfaction of having pricked another slug in the garden. It really was shaping into a beautiful day. Sun shining, birds twittering. Next door, the Anders's wind chimes rattled pleasantly, like hollowed-out bones. Mrs. Bellows from across the street stood up from weeding her lawn and threw her a big friendly wave. "Hi, Rose!"
"Morning, Mrs. Bellows," Rose shouted back. She sipped her lemonade, sitting back with a contented sigh.
A fine, fine day on Hayworth Street. Nothing could spoil it, not even the sight of that ugly old truck and its gently rattling bell.
VIDEO NASTIES
1 – NASTiES
EXTERIOR. STREET. NIGHT.
In the blur of driving rain, Harlan Wallis didn't see the box of old videotapes outside the fire-blackened factory until he'd just about walked into it. As an avid collector of old movies, his eyes immediately lighted on two rare video nasties resting upon the others--Massacre at Central High and Nightkill, both films only ever available on VHS. Like a man protecting a wounded animal, he dropped to his knees to spare the soggy box from further damage. Hurrying the rest of the way home hunched over the box, soaked to the skin, Harlan just hoped the tapes beneath the first layer might still be salvageable, if not the rest.
He supposed he owed his good fortune to Vicky, who'd thrust him out into the downpour despite his fear of being struck by lightning, telling him in a flurry of words she wished it would zap him straight to Hell. The storm had died down since, leaving only the rain to worry about--along with his battered ego. Vicky had really let him have it this time, facing him with the sad unalterable truth their relationship was definitely over.
They'd never been right for each other, he and Vicky, and it had never been more apparent than in their choice of entertainment. Harlan loved old horror movies, the cornier and nastier the better. He relished the feeling of superiority, knowing exactly what would jump out at him and when, being able to guess who would die and how within the first few minutes, and laughing derisively when his predictions came true.
Vicky, on the other hand, watched movies to be emotionally moved, and their argument tonight had related directly to this apparently irreconcilable difference. She had put on a horror movie in hope of bridging the gap, and he'd sniped about it the whole way through. After twenty minutes, Vicky had turned it off in frustration.
"You aren't even giving it a chance!" she'd cried.
"Oh, I did," he'd replied with a yawn. "It's just trying way too hard."
"And you think that's a bad thing? Maybe if you--"
She'd stopped there, but Harlan had seized on it like a piranha on a bikini-clad bimbo. "Maybe if I what? Tried harder?"
"No, that's not what I was going to say. You can't predict everything, you know."
Harlan had sputtered his objection, and Vicky, exasperated, had thrown a handful of popcorn at him.
"I'm sick of it, Harlan! Everything needs to be self-awa
re and snarky, or you won't give it a second look."
"That's not true," he'd said. "I love old movies."
And that was it: the phrase that ended their relationship. Moved to tears, Vicky said, "Sometimes I think you love those old movies more than you ever loved me."
For the first time in Harlan's twenty-six years, he hadn't been able to find the words to argue.
He loved her. Of course, he loved her. The question was if he loved her as much as he loved movies, and for that, he still didn't have an answer.
At the door to his apartment, Harlan held the dripping box awkwardly on one knee, and fumbled to get the key card from his pocket. He managed to heft the box into the living room just before the cardboard split at the seams, bursting open, tapes spreading across the rug like when he was little and would dump out his Lego blocks to build an army of original monsters.
Rows upon rows of old VHS tapes already lined the walls surrounding the television, but there was always room for new acquisitions. He slipped one out of its cover (Peeping Tom, once banned in Finland), shook water from it, and laid it on the carpet to dry. Thinking he'd better do the same for the rest, he rushed to the bathroom closet for towels. When they'd first started dating six years prior, Vicky had bought him a matching set of plush ones, having complained about the tattered and threadbare towels he'd scrounged from his family home after his parents had passed. The old towels were relics of his childhood--like his furniture, his posters, and much of his VHS collection.
Maybe what Vicky said is true, he thought now, looking over his newfound treasures. Maybe I am living in the past.
He didn't want to consider why.
Spreading the towels out on the floor and table, Harlan sat cross-legged on the rug and began removing tapes from their soggy covers, separating dry from wet. Classics like Willlard (the original, not the subpar remake with Crispen Glover) and Tod Browning's Freaks, a few Troma films, a handful of Hammer Horrors, the extremely rare Snuff. Looking over the vibrant, macabre, and often unintentionally humorous covers reminded him of those long-ago trips to the video store, his parents searching for what seemed like hours to find something appropriate for the three of them to watch, while he marveled at demons sprung from toilets, buxom heroines clinging to muscular warriors, half-rotted skulls, switchblade hooligans, and muscle car grilles marred by streaks of blood. He'd felt most at home there among the oddities, with some horror movie flickering on the TVs overhead, the heady smell of stale popcorn filling his nostrils.
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