Donovan’s brow knit, and he glared through the screen, trying to discern the face beyond it. “I’m sorry. I’m going to have to cut this short. I have no need for these memories to be dredged up. Who do you think you are?”
He tried to stand, but stopped halfway through the action, as though he had been suddenly turned to stone.
“You may have noticed that you can’t move,” said Joe, his voice calm. “It’s a little trick I can do. What’s happening is that blood is being restricted to certain parts of your muscles. This produces a paralysis effect. In fact, I can control you like a puppet if I want to. It’s quite a feeling, control over another human being. But I don’t need to tell you, do I?”
Donovan’s eyes darted back and forth as his heart starting pumping harder.
“In answer to your question,” Joe said, “who I think I am is the man who is going to dispense justice for those boys, and for all the other things you’ve done in your misbegotten life.”
Donovan implored his body to obey him, to let him flee, but his limbs would not respond. His arms and legs might have been encased in concrete for all the good his efforts did. He was a prisoner in his own flesh.
“Your heart rate is spiking, Father, I can hear it. It’s deafening. Is something on your mind? This is the perfect place to absolve yourself,” Joe’s voice was serene, but taunting. “Do you remember those boys, Father? They trusted you, right until the end. And what did you do? Mutilated them for your own sick pleasure. You thought you’d gotten away with it, fooled everyone.”
Joe’s posture relaxed, and Donovan felt his muscles slacken along with him as the paralysis ebbed away. The priest eased himself back into his seat. He peered through the screen at his antagonist. Joe seemed to be lost in reverie, miles away from the confessional, at least mentally.
Sensing an opportunity for escape, Donovan lunged for the door. He couldn’t quite reach it before he was paralyzed again. His hands frozen in place just inches from the handle.
“Don’t do that again.” Joe paused, thinking. “I can do a lot more than just stop you from moving.”
Donovan felt something in his right hand, a sensation like the pins and needles when feeling returns to a slumbering limb. But this was far more intense, a rushing wave of sharp pain like dipping his hand in a river of glass shards. He looked down at it, and watched in helpless horror as his right pointer finger began to swell. It looked like a balloon, glistening and shiny as it continued to distort and change color: flesh to red to an infected purple. Finally it popped, spraying blood everywhere. The force was sufficient to shatter the priest’s finger bones, leaving a small stump behind.
“What do you think about that, Father?”
The priest offered no response, but his mind was a chorus of pain. He screwed his eyes shut, his only power at that moment.
The bloody stump of his finger started to congeal, sealing shut. His eyes still closed in pain, and he continued to struggle against the paralysis.
“Fighting me just wastes precious mental energy.” Joe said. ”And I need your undivided attention. Now, LOOK AT ME!”
Joe’s voice echoed in the empty church, and Donovan’s eyes flew open, but not by his own will. “I have killed many, many people over the millennia. And, sometimes, yes, I do it for fun. I can forgive the occasional serial killer, we all have our passions and cravings from time to time. Hell, Jack the Ripper and I used to enjoy a good tankard of ale together. He was crazy, but get a few drinks in him and he’s one insanely fun guy.”
The priest stared at the stump where his finger had been, contemplating its absence through the stillunbearable pain, when he heard something. Footsteps, just outside the confessional, drawing closer.
Someone must have heard the shouting. He willed himself to speak, make any kind of sound, to alert them. There was every chance that doing so would simply cause whoever was out there to share his fate, of course; but it was also possible that whatever this man’s powers were had a limit, and that he could overcome. It was a chance that Donovan was more than willing to take.
Joe’s hand smashed through the metal screen separating them. Latching onto Donovan’s throat, he pulled the priest’s face toward the opening, twisting his neck with a force that seemed impossible for a man to possess.
“I said LOOK AT ME!” he hissed, keeping his voice down but still projecting an animal rage that was almost palpable.
The person hovering outside politely knocked. “Umm, Father Donovan? Is everything okay?”
The lunatic that held him was being cautious, as though, right now, he was vulnerable. Donovan knew, somehow, that if he could get some word to the man, just say one thing, he could turn the tables on his nemesis. He also knew that doing that would be as impossible as growing wings and flying away. His body would not obey him, it was just meat, completely under foreign occupation.
Then, a ray of hope. Surely if he said nothing, the Samaritan would sense something amiss. The parish knew he was scheduled to be here, and at least one person had seen him enter the confessional. Even if the stranger were to respond on his behalf, his own silence would arouse enough suspicion for the bystander to open the door. Then-
“Yes. All is well. I merely slipped. I will be done shortly,” Donovan was aware of his throat muscles and larynx being played like a harp as Joe puppeted them to approximate his speech.
“Okay...sorry for the intrusion.” The person moved away from the door and out of earshot. Their footsteps receding off into the distance, and along with them, Donovan’s last hope.
Joe returned his full attention to the priest; glaring at him, his eyes wild. The skittish gaze skipped rapidly from one eye to the other. The priest could feel his breath, hot like a furnace, brushing past him.
“Why did you kill Danielle? Did you sense that she was suspicious?”
Donovan tried to look away again and was yanked even closer to Joe as his reward. They were almost nose to nose now, the priest could see the pores in Joe’s face, his eyelashes, eyebrows. He searched the other man’s entire face in order to avoid that savage gaze. He was interrupted with a pain that almost defied his comprehension as his left eye swelled up and exploded. It split like a grape, a fissure through the retina creating an exit point for the blood and ocular fluids to spray outwards. The viscous, pinkish mixture sprayed on Joe’s face, but the man did not even blink. That accusatory stare still bored into the object of his hatred.
Donovan wanted to scream, to collapse, simply to die now would be preferable, but he was still paralyzed. The fluid from his ruined eye oozed down his cheek and past his mouth, dripping to the confessional floor.
Joe licked his lips. “I haven’t tasted AB negative in a long time.”
The blood, which until now had been leaking freely from Donovan’s ruined eye socket, began to congeal. The ragged hole in his face sealed itself over with a viscous, slick red film. The blood that had already been spilled, both on Donovan’s and Joe’s faces, began to glisten. It glowed ever so slightly in the dim confessional, rippling and vibrating of its own accord. It boiled, then evaporated, floating in the air like a pink mist, the gossamer strands of which were absorbed into Joe’s skin.
Joe’s eyes closed, and a look of serenity crossed his features as he stood. When his eyes opened, he looked at Donovan again. The rage was still there, but he seemed calmer now, more centered. Fed.
He pulled the priest bodily through the opening, then directed his hand toward the entrance on his side. A visible ripple passed through the air, smashing into the door, splintering it and exploding it outwards.
Some parishioners were sitting in the pews, waiting to confess. They stared as Joe stepped out of the confessional, Donovan still in his grasp.
“Please don’t be alarmed,” Joe bellowed. “I’m an ER physician and I need to get Father Donovan some help.”
Whether or not the parishioners believed Joe was irrelevant, they were too terrified to interfere with him. His altruistic statement was
somewhat undercut, at any rate, when he dragged their priest out of the church by the neck and across the tops of the pews. Joe sensed the serial killer’s pain as his body was bounced over the hardwood benches, knocking some over as he went. His suffering warmed the vampire’s heart, but it wasn’t nearly enough.
Joe took a left in the vestibule and exited the church through a side door that opened to an alley. He dragged his bleeding cargo to a nearby dumpster, which was, due to a late pickup on the part of the sanitation department, overflowing with bags of refuse. The slick green black bags overflowed from the rusty steel container out onto the concrete. Joe dropped the priest there, releasing his hold on him.
Donovan was too terrified to scream, his newfound freedom only produced a timid whisper, nearly lost in the traffic noise from the street. “I’m so, so sorry. Please have mercy.”
Joe glared down at him, his lips curled in a sneer. The priest cowered closer to the trash.“How…how do you know my secret?”
It didn’t seem possible, but the question seemed to make Joe even angrier. “For thirty years I’ve tracked you, sifted through the trail of repulsive crime scenes you left behind. I visited the dump sites, the victim’s homes; it was disgusting, soul-killing work, mucking through it all. Fortunately for me, I don’t have a soul, so I was able to put the pieces together. I had the time, and the motivation.
When I started staking this place out last week, I had almost entirely made up my mind. Then I saw you go to this place, you hid here, like an animal. You pleasured yourself.”
“But, how did you know I was the killer?”
Joe looked closely at Donovan. “I smelled them.”
The priest, even with his disfigured face, looked puzzled. Joe was exasperated, “The trophies, the parts that you cut from them. You kept them with you as you gave yourself pleasure. With my senses, I could smell the stench from a block away.”
Father Donovan’s face fell, deep with shame. “I truly am sorry.”
“I DON’T FUCKING CARE!” Joe gestured at the priest and his body stiffened, then slammed itself against the dumpster with bone crushing force. Donovan propped himself against the dumpster, his breath ragged, desperately trying to form words to at least express his pain.
“NO MORE TALKING,” Joe hissed. He stepped forward. “This is for the children.” He held out his hand toward him, then made a squeezing gesture with his fingers, as though he was picking, then crushing, an invisible grape. This was accompanied by the surprisingly soft sound of flesh tearing, then a wet muffled pop. Veins stood out on the priest’s face as his remaining eye went round with pain, a red stain began to spread across the front of his trousers.
Joe returned control to Father Donovan. He reached down to his crotch, and slumped to the ground.
“And your OTHER TESTICLE FOR DANIELLE!” Joe flicked his hand again, followed by another pop. Both of Donovan’s hands seemed to be trying to hold his genitals in place.
“Please be merciful. Kill…kill me quickly,” he whimpered.
Joe’s glare could have melted glass. “Danielle deserves much more than that. Killing you would be too easy.”
Father Donovan raised his head, his remaining eye fixed on Joe.
“So…what happened next?” I asked, not totally sure I wanted to hear of the final torture.
Joe cocked his head to the side. “Some shots of tequila first. You’re going to need it.”
I was already feeling buzzed. “Hell yeah. It was a rough day today. I could use some real brainkillers.” Joe went into the kitchen for the shots, as I called out, “Make mine double shots, with a beer chaser, Bro.”
I shook my head, surprised at myself for how calm I was being, how accepting I was. I’d heard Joe’s stories before, of course, but most of the ones up until this point hadn’t been anywhere close to what he’d just told me. Mostly they were just guys from hundreds of years ago, long dead and buried. Like the priest, they’d deserved their fates, but there had always been a distance, both in time and emotionally, to the way that Joe talked about killing them. With this guy, it was personal. And I guess that’s why I was so quick to accept it. It was sick, sadistic, and way over the line, but I got it. If I had Joe’s powers I might have done the same.
I was thinking of how he had saved Alyssa. She had tried to commit suicide, razoring her forearms from elbow to wrist. I found her covered in blood in the tub, with almost no heartbeat. The guys in the ambulance didn’t think she was still alive, they wanted to call it on the scene. I made them take her to the hospital, the whole way I held her hand. I tried to ignore how cold she felt.
When we got there, Joe was the first person I saw. I didn’t want to leave her side, and I tried to get into the operating room with her. Joe tried to get in my way, and I was about to punch him in the face. Stupid, I know, but I wasn’t thinking straight. I felt the paralysis for myself that night, it felt like I was encased in concrete. Joe looked in my eyes, practically right through me, and I think he saw something he could relate to.
“You love her,” he said, and that gaze bored into me, I couldn’t say anything, but he seemed to get what he wanted from me. “What you see in here, you tell to no one,” he’d said, and it was the most serious shit I’d heard in my life. He let me go, and I nodded, then followed him into the ER.
There was no nurse available at that time, so we were in the ER by ourselves. It turned out to be a good thing, because it allowed Joe to really do his stuff. He waved his hands over Alyssa like a magician, but the tension in his face showed that this was no magic act. The first thing that happened was the wounds in her arms sealed themselves, not just healed, but more like they’d never been there in the first place. There was an IV of blood next to the gurney that wasn’t hooked up to anything. It turned out it didn’t have to be: Joe swept his hand past it and the blood seemed to come alive, flowing towards Alyssa like a shiny red snake.
Joe tore her shirt open, and the blood struck her in the center of her chest, then seemed to disappear into her. Joe held his hand in front of her breastbone like a claw, and, ever so gently, squeezed inwards. Then outwards, then back again. I could swear I heard her heart start to beat again.
He knew how much I loved her. When Alyssa regained consciousness, I knew that Joe had not only saved her life, but mine as well.
Joe returned from the kitchen, shots and beers in hand. We both knocked the tequila back, and chugged the beers. I was stumbling as I headed to the washroom to take a leak. I stood there, savoring the relief as I emptied my bladder. I wondered if I was intoxicated enough for whatever it was that Joe had to show me. Ask me a week beforehand and I would have said hell yes, but that story he’d just told me, that was messed up even by his standards. But then I reminded myself that he was my friend, he’d saved Alyssa, he trusted me with his secrets. I had to believe that whatever he had in store was no more than I could handle. In Joe I trust. I finished up, both literally and metaphorically shaking it off, and headed back for the capper for the evening.
“Ready?” queried Joe.
“I think so.”
Joe headed toward the door of his cellar, and we both stumbled down the creaky steps. We traveled to the back wall, past moldy and dust covered shelves. He slid open a secret panel and breathed onto a special sensor. Clearly it wasn’t a breathalyzer because it beeped its satisfaction, and the wall beside it slid away.
We entered the climate controlled “trophy room”; all cold metal and fluorescent lights, like something that Batman would have. The lights came on automatically, revealing spotless titanium shelves and glass cases. The items inside each had their own lighting, which also came to life as we entered. Most of the trophies were organic, but they stayed in perfect condition, somehow, owing to Joe and his crazy powers.
He had brought me down here a few times before, but just in passing, I really didn’t have time to look around. I’d been there often enough to know the basic drill, though. The weapons were first: A row of blades, pirate cutlass
es, samurai swords, large hunting knives—many still coated in blood that looked fresh. They would have been worth millions to a museum, but Joe didn’t care, they had far more significance for him.
Then came the organic exhibits, I noticed there had been some new additions since I was down there last: a skeleton with chunks of flesh still attached, a severed hand with a large ring on its pointer finger that I could have sworn twitched as I passed it. There was no time to investigate, Joe was intent on showing me his latest addition. Maybe it was the alcohol, but I’d never seen him this excited.
When we reached the newest trophy, I wasn’t sure what to think. It was in a glass case, freestanding, lit from beneath with LED lights. It looked like an abstract sculpture, vaguely resembling a human being in materials but not in shape. Arms and legs were twisted and broken in ways that I can only describe as aesthetic choices. The body was rearranged to align to some standard of horrifying beauty that only the truly demented could properly appreciate. Sections of its skin had been flayed from its body, these areas still appeared to be freshly exposed, scintillating in the harsh LED light. At first I thought it was hovering, but as I got closer I could see that it was suspended by a polished chrome rod, run through its center.
“Actually, those parts of the skin are turned inside out.” Joe seemed to read my mind as I examined it more closely. I say “it” because that’s what it was to me, any humanity it might have had was erased by its distortion. It was meat now, converted to art.
“Wow,” was all I could say. I felt a rumbling in my stomach as I started to regret mixing tequila with beer.
I looked closer at the areas where the skin had been reversed. It looked like it was covered by a light red ooze. I could see the evidence to Joe’s story on the body: the eye socket without the eye, the missing finger, mutilated testicles. I peered still closer and a question occurred to me.
“Where is his penis?”
The Aching Darkness_A Dark Fantasy Anthology Page 22
