TWIN KILLER MYSTERY THRILLER BOX SET (Two full-length novels)

by Osborne, Jon

  So, Jewish or not, my mother had absolutely no qualms whatsoever about going forward with the extremely dangerous procedure. And why would she have any qualms about it? What did she have to lose at this point? Another child?

  Probably not one of her biggest concerns, considering her history.

  Only my special bris – which translated to “covenant of circumcision” from the Hebrew – would go quite a bit further than the simple removal of my foreskin.

  Quite a bit further, indeed.

  In some early cultures, castration was performed on soldiers who’d lost in battle. The winners did it to symbolize their complete victory over their defeated foes and to take away their very manhood and they could never retrieve it again.

  For her part, my mother symbolized her victory over me with a sharp scalpel, no anesthesia and with a delighted smile planted firmly on her pretty lips.

  After tying me down by my wrists and ankles with thick leather restraints to the huge wooden table in the middle of our kitchen, she stood over me with the sharp surgical instrument balanced unsteadily in her delicate right hand.

  “Try not to move, son,” she said theatrically, hovering the glinting blade just a few inches above my private parts. “If you move, I might mess it up. And if you scream, I’ll make sure I mess it up on purpose.”

  I tried my very best to keep silent – tried with every last ounce of energy I possessed – but when the sharp steel sliced deep into the tender skin at the top of my genitalia I had no choice but to scream. I screamed loud and long and hard, screamed until I felt like I had razor blades crammed down my throat, screamed until I had no voice left with which to scream.

  But my mother only watched me silently the entire time, not even the slightest trace of emotion crossing her beautiful face. Not even the slightest indication that my animalistic howls affected her eardrums in the least little bit.

  When I’d finally stopped my screaming – much too exhausted to make another sound and feeling a pain in my penis like none I’d ever experienced before – my mother tutted.

  “Now, now, son,” she said soothingly. “I warned you, didn’t I? I was just going to take your foreskin and testicles, but now I suppose I’ll have to take the whole sinful thing. I wish you hadn’t made me do this. But you did.”

  With that, she discarded the scalpel in favor of a wickedly sharp meat cleaver that was hanging over our kitchen table along with a variety of other knives. As the longtime wife of a butcher, she knew exactly what to do.

  She undid the leather restraints on my ankles and turned my limp body over onto one side before pulling the shaft of my penis taut against the wooden surface of the table.

  Then she lifted up her right arm in one swift movement and brought down her gloved hand again in a blindingly fast chopping motion. It took less than a second for the meat cleaver to slice effortlessly through flesh and veins and arteries and make resounding contact with the wood.

  I don’t remember screaming again at that point. Everything had gone pitch-black and dead silent. I suppose the trauma of the entire ordeal must have signaled my brain to flood with endorphins, nature’s very own painkillers: a way for my body to deny the horrific trauma to which it had just been subjected.

  Total removal of the male genitalia didn’t come without its inherent risks, however. Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact. For one, the danger of death due to bleeding or infection was much greater than with simple removal of the testicles. But like everything else in her extremely well planned-out life, my mother had prepared for that possibility too.

  Blood spurting forth like an exploding geyser from between my quivering thighs and every last cell in my body screaming out in pure agony as my mother moved to the stove and held the flat side of the meat cleaver against a burner glowing bright red, the world around me blurred, swimming in and out of focus until everything appeared to me as though I were viewing it through a thick sheet of rain-spattered glass.

  My mother returned to the table and pressed the hot metal against my wound to cauterize it. The sound of sizzling flesh filled my ears. The smell of cooking meat wafted up into my nostrils, mixing in with the scent of her expensive perfume and making me gag.

  Chanel No. 5, of course. Nothing but the very best for her.

  “What do you say, son?” she asked.

  Somehow – despite the unspeakable horror to which I’d just been subjected – I managed to mumble my reply right before I passed out for good.

  “Thank you, Mother,” I said.

  And once again – strange as it might have sounded to any of the so-called normal people out there in the world – the really sick thing about the whole thing was that I actually meant it.

  Chapter 13

  The overwhelming blackness of Dana’s nightmare morphed first into a hazy gray, then pure white, and finally a blinding flash of vibrant colors that hurt her brain so badly it threatened to bring on a seizure.

  She squinted hard against the disorienting visual onslaught, feeling more confused than she’d ever felt before in her entire life. Nothing made sense to her. Nothing had ever made sense to her. Nothing would ever make sense to her again.

  As she gradually established her bearings, a soul-freezing chill passed through her body, directly through her heart. Shocked, she watched as the colors in her world transformed again into a grainy black-and-white, like an old-time newsreel where everything jumped around and flickered as though the footage was being played on an antique film projector set to the wrong speed.

  She sucked in a sharp breath that sent an agonizing stab of pain slicing hard through her lungs. A man had just walked right through her. A small silver pistol peeked out from the rear waistband of his filthy jeans. His walk was confident, completely sure of itself, practically a swagger.

  Dana blinked rapidly and tried desperately to make sense of the mind-bending scene in front of her. No use.

  Suddenly, though, her brain nearly collapsed on itself when she realized exactly what this was. Exactly where she was.

  The home of her childhood. 3330 Eastlawn Street; West Park-section of Cleveland. The place where her parents had been brutally murdered thirty-five years earlier. The place where she’d barely escaped bloody murder at the hands of the same deranged madman when she’d been just four years old – saved only by a concerned neighbor who’d heard screaming in the night.

  Her breath quickened in her throat. Her temples pounded on the sides of her skull. For one terrifying moment, her heart actually stopped beating dead in her chest.

  A cold shiver skittered down the length of Dana’s spine as she shook her head in bewilderment and again tried to process the baffling imagery before her. No good. But then a second, more powerful wave of shivers wracked her body when the next chilling realization finally dawned on her.

  Since she now understood exactly where she was, it could mean only one thing.

  She also knew the identity of the man who’d just passed through her in the darkened hallway, knew his lifeless eyes as well as she knew her own.

  And now he was heading for her bedroom.

  She willed her legs to move but it wasn’t easy. Her limbs felt like cast-iron weights chained to her body right now. Marshalling all of her strength, she struggled forward to the doorway of her bedroom and peered in to witness a horror movie she didn’t want to see. Not again.

  A Superman nightlight illuminated a child’s sleeping face in the darkness. Nathan Stiedowe loomed over the child’s bed with a huge butcher’s knife dangling from his powerful right hand. Glittering beams of moonlight streamed in through the window next to the bed and bounced off the razor-sharp blade.

  Dana almost threw up when the child shifted in his sleep and afforded her a clear view of his unlined face.

  Bradley, the little boy from the plane who’d promised to marry her one day.

  Stunned stupid, she watched in horror as her half-brother lifted the gleaming knife high over his head, ready to plunge the unforgiving
steel deep into the boy’s tender throat. She tried to scream out a warning but no sound would emerge.

  Shifting her gaze to the mirror hanging above the bureau of her childhood bedroom, she abruptly caught sight of her own face. Her mouth had been sewn shut. Tight stitches fastened her lips together, rendering her mute.

  Dana tried to hurtle herself into the room to stop the monster before he could kill the little boy, but she looked down in horror to see that her feet had been nailed to the floor by six-inch railroad spikes bleeding rust. All she could now do was look on helplessly as the monster brought down the sharp knife in a blinding flash of silver that would soon be joined by a sickening explosion of red as the boy’s jugular vein burst and he bled out all over the matching Superman sheets.

  But the knife never came down. Instead, Nathan Stiedowe simply lowered the glimmering steel to his side and reached down to stroke the boy’s silky blonde hair.

  “I’ll be back for you in just a bit, little boy,” he whispered. “That much you can count on.”

  Bradley only mumbled dreamily in response.

  Turning away from the child, the monster then exited the room, passing through Dana’s body again as he went. In a flash of jumbled images, her mind sped through the police reports of the devastating night in 1976 that she knew by heart.

  Her father, James Whitestone, would be the first to die, gunned down by his wife’s illegitimate child – the product of a brutal rape over a church altar when Dana’s mother had been just sixteen years old. As James Whitestone relieved himself in the bathroom following a tender lovemaking session with his beloved wife, a .22-caliber slug would shatter his skull from behind, sending goopy chunks of his destroyed brain matter sliding down the tiled wall above the toilet in a disgusting rainbow of gray and white and red.

  Dana strained her eyes through the darkness and watched the monster enter the bathroom, the scene of her father’s horribly grisly murder in 1976. The soft scratch of plastic shower rings sliding across a steel rod filled her ears as her half-brother concealed himself inside the tub. Right on cue, her father emerged from the master bedroom and closed the bathroom door behind him.

  The gunshot that rang out ten seconds later was loud enough to rattle all the pictures hanging on the wall, followed almost at once by the muted thump of a heavy weight collapsing to the floor.

  Horrified tears streaked down Dana’s cheeks and blurred her vision. Through the watery veil obscuring her eyes, she watched numbly as her mother emerged quickly from the master bedroom, alerted by the commotion in the hallway.

  Dana’s heart shattered into a million tiny pieces at her first glimpse of the beautiful face she hadn’t seen for more than thirty-five years now. Same short blonde hair as her own. Same pale blue eyes. Same diminutive figure.

  Sara Whitestone knocked lightly on the bathroom door, a pattern of worry-lines etched deep into her smooth forehead. “James, honey?” she asked tentatively. “Are you OK in there? What was that noise?”

  The monster cleared his throat inside the bathroom. “I’m fine,” he coughed. “I’ll be out in just a minute.”

  Sadly, Sara was completely fooled by the mimicry, just as she’d been on the devastating night of July 4th, 1976. Without knowing it, Dana’s mother had just made the same horrible mistake that would lead to her same horrible death. The same horrible death Dana couldn’t do a goddamn thing to stop.

  Once again – just as had been the case when she’d been four years old – she was completely powerless to wake up from this awful nightmare.

  “Jesus Christ,” Sara Whitestone breathed. “You scared the living shit out of me, babe. I thought you broke your neck in there or something. Hurry up and come back to bed already, would you?”

  Turning on her heel, she then walked back to the master bedroom with her satin night robe flowing behind her like the train of an elaborate wedding dress. Fifteen seconds later, the monster followed her out into the darkness and loomed in the doorway of her bedroom, just another seemingly harmless shadow in the night.

  Without warning, Dana’s body suddenly vaulted down the hallway at great speed; moved by an unseen force that positioned her just as easily as a chess player positions a pawn. In the blink of an eye, she was standing directly behind the monster, close enough to reach out and touch him had she been able to control her arms.

  Dana gagged. From this distance, she could actually smell the murdering bastard; smell the pure evil wafting off his body. A sickening combination of vinegar and battery acid and rotting meat that turned her stomach inside out.

  Inside the bedroom, her mother was lying on her side in the king-sized bed, dressed only in a flimsy off-white negligee now, the night robe she’d been wearing a moment earlier dripping from the doorknob of the closet like strands of shimmering silver garland dripping from the branches of a beautifully decorated Christmas tree.

  Sara had her pretty head propped up coquettishly on one small hand. Smiling at the monster through the darkness, she said, “You gonna stay out there all night, lover boy, or are you gonna come keep me company in this big old bed already?”

  When the monster crossed the threshold of the master bedroom, Dana’s mother bolted upright as she suddenly realized he was not her husband. Not even close. A tiny squeak escaped her lips, but she was much too stunned to immediately scream.

  Taking in a deep breath that expanded her birdlike chest nearly to the point of bursting, she finally let out a loud, earsplitting wail that caused the monster to race across the room and clamp a large gloved hand over her mouth.

  “Shut the fuck up, bitch,” he hissed, spraying hot saliva all over Sara’s smooth cheek. “One more sound and I’ll chop up your precious goddamn son into so many pieces they won’t be able to put him back together again for the funeral.”

  Sara squirmed in the monster’s strong grasp, an impotent field mouse struggling to escape the eagle’s powerful talons. Nathan Stiedowe leaned down into her face and smiled, his perfectly even teeth sparkling brightly in the darkness and emitting an eerie, almost phosphorescent light. “Tell me something,” he snarled. “Do you even know who I am?”

  A brief look of confusion colored in Sara’s beautiful face, followed almost at once by a horrified jolt of recognition that Dana could feel inside her own chest.

  “Jeremiah,” Sara whispered.

  The monster reared back and slapped Dana’s mother so hard across the face that Dana could hear her mother’s teeth rattle in her mouth even from across the room.

  “That’s not my name anymore, slut,” the monster spat. “You made damn sure of that a long time ago and now I’m going to kill you for it. For your information, my name’s Nathan Stiedowe now – not that you give a flying fuck. Stupid little cunts like you never give a flying fuck about who you hurt, do you? Only worried about yourselves and your precious goddamn families.”

  He paused and narrowed his glittering eyes. “But before I kill you, tell me something first, Mom. How could you do it, anyway?

  “How could you give away your own fucking baby?”

  CHAPTER 14

  The heartbreaking story of Sara Whitestone’s brutal rape over an altar at St Anthony’s Catholic Church in the late-1950s – as told to Nathan Stiedowe while he held a sharp knife pressed against Sara’s throat – crushed Dana’s spirit. For his part, however, Nathan Stiedowe didn’t seem quite so moved.

  Quite the contrary, as a matter of fact.

  Crushing Sara’s slender shoulders beneath his knees with all his weight, he stared down hard into her eyes. “That’s a real touching story, Mom. Really it is. Still, I’m afraid it’s not quite good enough. Time to pay the piper, cunt. But first I think I’ll give you an idea of what it was like for me growing up. How does that sound to you?”

  Roughly flipping Sara onto her stomach, he yanked down her satin panties around her knees and slapped her hard on her bare buttocks, a stinging blow that turned her backside red.

  “‘For this you know – no fornicat
or, unclean person nor covetous man who is an idolater has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God!’ Ephesians, chapter 5, verse 5.”

  He slapped her again, even harder this time.

  “‘Let the people turn from their wicked deeds! Let them banish from their minds the very thought of doing wrong! Let them turn to the Lord that He may have mercy on them! Yes, turn to our God, for He will abundantly pardon!’ Book of Isaiah, chapter 55, verse 7.”

  Flipping Sara back over, the monster pinned her shoulders beneath his weight again. Running the sharp knife lightly over her throat left a superficial but very painful cut in its wake. Even in the darkness, Dana could easily make out the stark contrast between the bright red blood and the pale white skin at her mother’s throat.

  Just then, however, her mother’s panicked blue eyes suddenly widened in horror at the sight of something over Nathan Stiedowe’s left shoulder.

  The monster turned and followed her gaze to the doorway of the bedroom. Dana did the same. Two feet away and wearing his blue-and-white footy-pajamas, Bradley was holding a teddy bear in one tiny hand and shifting uncomfortably from one foot to the other as though he needed to go to the bathroom.

  “Mommy, what’s happening?” the little boy asked, his small voice quiet and shy. “You’re scaring me. Who’s that man on top of you? Where’s my daddy?”

  Nathan Stiedowe locked gazes with the little boy, freezing little Bradley like an ice sculpture in his paralyzing stare.

  He never took his eyes off the boy as he whipped the sharp blade across Sara’s neck again, this time cutting all the way to the bone.

  Jolted out of his stupor, the little boy screamed so loudly that it nearly drowned out the watery gurgling sounds Sara was making as she choked to death on her own blood.

  The monster sprang off the bed in a preternatural flash of movement, leaping toward the doorway and passing directly through Dana’s body again. The little boy’s enormous blue eyes rounded in terror as Nathan Stiedowe yanked the sharp knife high overhead and bright red droplets of Sara Whitestone’s freshly drawn blood slid down the glinting blade before spattering onto his tiny upturned face.