Samantha could hear all that noise, but the location of her room did not allow her to see anything. If the window were to the park, she would clearly not look out the window in her present condition.
But fortunately, that was not so.
She walked away from the window and returned to the bed. Tom still stared at Samantha's slim body when, was afraid to be discovered, he raised his neck, and it stretched like gum. Samantha was sitting on the bed with her back to Tom. She had a book in her hands and was passing the pages quickly, as if searching for a particular page. She got bored and dropped the book on the floor. There was a dull thud, and Samantha lay on the bed and reached out, pulling the lamp string. A moment later, the room was submerged in the venereal shadows of the night. Dad had even had time to plug in the lamps. It was interesting. What else could he have done?
"Oh, duh... damn it!" Tom tapped the back of his hand with his right fist, making a flop noise. "I cuh... can't see anything anymore."
Tom went back to the bed and dropped on it. His penis was still erect, and now he felt like it was becoming a mass of pain again. With his eyes fixed on the ceiling, he began to replay in his head what he had seen through the window. Two fucking bumps at chest height that aroused interest and something more... that, in a way, he could not explain. It made him have an erection.
Same as all the fucking mornings, and he had to get up limping. Momma had really beat him up for that reason, and Tom knew that momma did not like it, but he still did not understand what that was all about. The two fucking rags, more or less erect, made him horny.
He tried to guess, he tried hard, but his little imagination only saw two bumps that made him horny. At the memory, a tingle rose up his stomach until it reached his throat. The tingle gripped his virile member and made it grow.
Soon, Samantha would become an obsession for him.
He spent a long time like this, until the mewing of a horny cat woke him from his permanently horny dreams.
He Googled the words "two bundles of women", well, with a lot of misspellings, and found nothing.
29
Jack appeared again. It was the most perverse identity before Justin's identity appeared, much more twisted and horrible. But there was still time for this new identity to seize Tom. Now, he was Jack.
With his hand tightened so hard his knuckles went white, Jack dragged his new neighbor's corpse into the basement. As he moved, he left a messy trail of blood drawn irregularly on the ground. Blood clotted quickly, and Jack tugged at his taut hair. The victim's vertebrae cracked, and he was now as heavy as a lead-filled pouch. The body, though still warm, had symptoms of postmortem stiffness.
Jack spoke clearly.
"You must die, fucking neighbor" he said, raising his arm with the marble ashtray in his hand.
"Oh my God!" the man said as he lifted both arms and put his hands to his face to protect himself.
"I hate new neighbors" Jack whispered, and sunk his arm like a hammer. There was a loud thud. The man screamed and collapsed on the floor immediately as his vision dyed red.
The head showed a large gap, huge, and a stream of blood gushed and covered his face and shirt. A few drops of blood spattered the wall and the sofa. They also reached Jack's hand.
He had all night to clean it all neatly, calmly, and let out his other obsession-for cleanliness-to disinfect all the things he had touched, which had stained. Jack left nothing to chance. He knew when the victim was going to be alone and when not. He selected his victims well, and sometimes they were women. Fortunately, and everything must be said, there was never a minor among them. Was that any better? It was not, but at least...
The neighbor's wife, whose name he did not know and did not need to know, had been away for a few days to take care of her sick mother in Sarasota. When she died three days later, she returned home and did not find her husband's comfort. He had not answered her constant phone calls. But her mood did not allow her to see beyond her nostrils, and she simply waited at home alone, lying on the couch draped in a blanket, waiting and waiting. She did not see any bloodstains on the sofa. On the fourth day, she called the police and, two weeks later, she left home.
Of course they never found the body of her husband, or rather her husband, who had simply been declared voluntarily disappeared.
Jack did not show up until the next neighbor came.
It happened as Tom saw those arms fumbling from the hollow of his window, but he remembered nothing.
30
The next day dawned splendorous as usual, announcing that it was going to be a hot day. However, the suffocating heat could not announce that the day was going to complicate suddenly when Eillen went out to the street.
The day had only just begun, and Eillen was about to open the door when a scream suddenly strangled in her throat. Louis went out immediately and saw that Eillen had put one hand to her chest while the other pointed at the door.
Louis's eyes widened in a frightful grimace of horror and astonishment behind his glasses. After him, Samantha came out her scream after seeing the scene was shivering. A shriveled cry, a shriek of unreasonable proportions that flooded the garden like a shower of waves. Bringing her hands to her mouth, she finally managed to strangle the scream like a police siren.
What was there was just aberrant and surprising.
On the outside of the door, there was a cat pined on the door with a large kitchen knife. His eyes were wide and glassy, fixed on a faraway point. Far. The paws were open in a position of astonishment and terror, and the cat was black. A brownish black that boded something awful.
"Dammit!" Louis muttered, slapping the door jamb. "Who did this?"
"Who could have done this?" Eillen asked with one hand partially covering her mouth.
"Some son of a bitch!" Louis answered furiously.
Samantha, after screaming, had completely muted. Her eyes were disengaged and angry, her hands covering her mouth, and her heart throbbing wildly beneath her chest. Suddenly, she burst into tears and went back inside running.
"Honey, make sure Tony doesn't see this while I go get a bag to remove this shit" Louis said turning his back on the cat. Don't be afraid. It’s nothing. It’s over." Louis kissed Eillen's forehead, partially stiffened, her hand still partially covering her mouth.
"Is this a warning?" She asked, pushing her hand away from her mouth.
"I don't know. Hopefully it isn’t. This town seems greatly peaceful. I don't know who could have done this. Maybe it's just a bunch of kids doing pranks. Now all of them are on vacation, and maybe in this time it's normal to see this kind of thing." They had not noticed it, but a few days had already gone by, and it was August.
Eillen calmed down a bit. Her heart began to beat rhythmically. Louis's words had helped her regain confidence in the situation.
Louis went into the house and a moment later appeared with a bag in his hand. Eillen had always stood with her back to the cat, with the only obsession to find the exact answer to all that, but as Louis had said, it had only been a kids prank. That was what had happened, and she wanted to believe in that fervently. Samantha was still in a fit of tears inside, wrapped in tears spilling over her delicate cheekbones.
"Honey, why don't you go in and comfort Samantha?" Louis shook his head as if this were an order, and Eillen obeyed.
"You've been long" Eillen said nervously as her figure faded as she entered the house.
Louis shook his head.
...I was thinking the same thing as you, sweetie. It is just a prank. At least that's what I want.
Louis turned to the cat with long, sharp fangs that stared at him with glassy eyes in the utmost silence. He raised his eyebrows in a gesture of disgust as he tried to tear it away, gripping hard the knife that resisted to get off the door
Meanwhile, inside the house, Eillen was trying to calm Samantha, who was still crying a river and could hear Tony saying;
"What's wrong, mom?"
"Nothing. Her belly hurts.
"
"Oh!"
31
Charlie's identity knew it, but Tom did not. Like a vampire, the cat was stuck on the door, except it did not have a wooden stake, but a big knife. Charlie knew that. He knew the stinking, soft smell of blood as running down the door. The last mewing was heartbroken and husky, hoarse perhaps. That puff excited him. Tom simply thought it was "a bad thing". He told his cousin Amelia via the Facebook window. He almost cried. His red eyes were not the ones that represented Charlie when he was face to face with the dying pussycat.
Of course Tom did not remember anything.
In the kitchen, however, another knife was missing.
32
"Dammit! In this house more and more things go missing" Stella complained as she eagerly rummaged in one of the drawers in the kitchen. "Fucking home! God damn it!" She gasped tiredly. She had drunk, as usual. The bottle of Bourbon on the table was surrounded by three or four empty glasses. She turned to the bottle and gave it a cynical smile, as if it were watching her continuously and silently. "You. You're the one to blame." She pointed at the bottle with a crumpled finger and closed the drawer. She screamed. She had caught her fingers. It was nothing chaotic, given the state she was in. She opened the drawer again and raised her hand. The fingers were still in the same place; that was enough not to start the fear alarm. She closed the drawer again and shuffled toward the bottle of Bourbon.
"Fucking drawer! I almost cut my fingers." She spoke by herself, and only the silence of the night absorbed her hollow, torn words. Her tone was slightly different from the rest of the day. She uttered an obscenity and poured herself more Bourbon. She raised the glass and toasted to the moon that was smiling openly in the night through the open wide window. She sipped from the glass, leaning back exaggeratedly and stammering as the alcohol fire ran down her throat, gulped down in a frightful race, to finally settle down in her stomach. A lacerating pain rose from there to the amygdala, replacing the pain of the fingers. It's a too familiar a pain, she thought as she put her hands to her stomach, slightly stooped, dropping the glass on the table, which landed in a crash that filled the night.
From outside, under the influence of the night, nobody or nothing answered.
"Dammit!" Her voice sounded dry and tired.it was as if each of the words would squeal in a lagoon of gaunt and twisted teeth, acting like cutting blades of sound. The pain was intense and had increased in the last few weeks, but she was reluctant to visit the doctor. According to her, doctors were to blame for her husband rotting underground. She would not go to the doctor ever. With one more drink of bourbon, it would pass, either because you lost consciousness or because the pain was so intense and penetrating that you confused it with the settlement of alcohol in the stomach.
With a trembling hand, she picked up the bottle of bourbon again and poured herself some more.
"This has to stop."
She set the bottle down beside the glass and watched it for a long time before the bourbon burned her insides again. With a thump, she set the glass down on the table, and then she remembered that she was looking for the serrated knife. The fucking serrated knife, just because she thought she did not to see it in the drawer where it had always been. She lifted her head and her snub nose, something that Tom had inherited from her, pointed toward the roof of the kitchen like the snout of a hungry animal.
"You've done it again, you little bastard" she stammered on the hot August night as she tried to calm her stomach ache with light massages on her belly.
... What have you done Tom? Did you swallow the knife? Have you hidden it? Or have you nailed a cat with it on someone's door?
Tom had done it once more, and his mother knew it. She knew that had happened once more. It was something Tom would never forget. Never? Did he even remember about it? Was it a mania? Did he want to do or say something by it? Would not he really never forget? Was there any recollection of Charlie's identity in him? No, of course not. What he would never forget is his mother's enormous hysterical accusation, accusing him once more of nailing a cat on the neighbors' door. In the end, Tom would believe it, so he would take all the blame, even knowing that he would not remember anything.
His mother did know, because she had seen him one day with his hands stained with blood...
"One of these days, I'll stab you with the knife, you little bastard." On the ground, an ant tried to catch a crumb of bread so large it could barely move it. Outside the moon, chubby and pale, still smiled magically, as if she were continually watching Stella. And somewhere in the world, a battered cat meowed in the middle of the night.
She stood for a long time with her nose pointed toward the kitchen ceiling. She stood for a long time with her hand at stomach height until pain slowly subsided and nearly died out. She lowered her head again and turned her gaze to the bottle of bourbon again. She moved her foot and, without realizing it, stepped on the ant, crushing it as she silently sent it across the world, into heaven. She took the glass again and hesitated a bit as she held it between her long fingers. Her eyes, raging and terribly red, fixed on the empty glass, and she remembered that she was sick. However, she would not go to the doctor anyway, because she knew that what she had was incurable. Doctors had not been able to save her husband. The same memory came again. She knew she had little time left. So why not drink some more? That speeded things up. What she did not know was that she would not die of that. She did not give a damn if Tom was left alone in this fucking world. Tom was worthless, and the state would take care of him. She did not give a damn if the pain showed up again, but she could not bear it. The state of intoxication concealed certain things. So she poured another glass and was about to take it to her lips when Tom yelled hysterically upstairs.
"Mommaaa!!!" When his mother came in through the door with raving eyes, after stumbling a couple of times on the stairs, Tom was in his underpants and kneeled on the bed. "The oooowl" Tom was pointing at the bed.
"What is it now?!" His mother barked at him.
"The uh... owl is un... under the bed."
Her fingers tangled in his hair, which remained practically neatly combed.
"Momma... you're hurting me."
"I'll hurt you more if you don't shut up!"
Tom, in spite of his great body, could not support for a long time the weight of his mother, so they ended up lying on the bed. Both were screaming, she hysterical and him pain.
"Momma, it huuuurts!"
"Shut up!" His mother cut him off abruptly as she tugged at Tom's hair again. She scratched his face and pinched his neck, and when she got up and stood staggering, she thought there was a drop of blood on Tom's right cheek.
Tom raised his hand to his face, and when he drew it back, he watched in panic that there was blood.
"Mommaaa! Blood!"
She gave him a look of contempt and violence at the same time.
"Blood. Blood. And what's that? If you don't shut up, you'll see more blood on your face. I'm already fed up with the story of the owl or whatever. Are you having a new attack like your father's brother? You’re a shit, did you know that?"
Tom shook his head.
"Blood momma"
"When will you shut that fucking beak?" Stella stammered as she turned to go get Sedum. It was in a drawer of her nightstand, because Tom had swallowed a whole tablet more than once, and he had almost kicked the bucket if she had not arrived on time the last two times. There were two more boxes in the medicine drawer. But Tom did not know where that fucking drawer was. Although later on he would figure it out.
Behind her, she left hysterical Tom's eyes widened as he watched the blood from his hand.
"Blood momma!"
A while later, she reappeared with a Sedum between her fingers, her hair pointing everywhere, as Tom had disheveled it during their fight. She grabbed Tom from the hair again, which now resembled an open pussy, and forced him to swallow the pill without water, as usual.
"Maybe you'll choke for once and for fucking all
, and I can die in peace" she said as she was at a safe distance from him. Although in most cases she managed to dominate Tom, it did not always happen that way. Sometimes, Tom gathered strength from somewhere, and she had to lock herself in her room.
This happened rarely, because Tom feared Mom.
Drool slipped down one side of Tom's mouth, and somewhere in his plump neck, Adam's apple rose and fell in an audible rattle, as if it were a worn gear from a machine.
His mother looked at him in disgust and turned her face suddenly, a few veins swelling in her neck.
"You bastard!"
"Blood, momma" Tom insisted, showing his open palm with the vague hope that momma would help him, but that would never happen. Momma was severe and bad; he even said it once. She was deeply religious and crazy. She kept a giant Christ in a small room, where she spent hours praying and atoning for her sins and drinking bourbon.
Stella turned slowly, and the image of Tom showing the palm of his hand seemed chaotic.
"Why do not you die? They need people in the cemetery. Did you know that? You are fucking worthless. Why don't you die and leave humanity alone? Freaks like you should be underground."
Drool touched Tom's chin and flopped down on the bed in a dull splash. Tom's eyes began to flutter, if that was the right word. They began to lose coherence, like his irregular and intermingled words. Lacking in meaning.
"The owl, blood... it huuurts..." he stopped and squinted slightly. Then he said, "Tis under the bed, and some... someday it will come and guh... give you what you... you deserve."
Tom's words fell like a jug of cold water over Stella, who opened her eyes wide and opened her mouth in a large, deformed O.
"What? Say that again."
But Tom dropped to his back, banging his head on the table, mute. Another identity within him had spoken.
The veins in Stella's neck seemed to push, trying to get out of there, when she restrained her rage. Her heart began pumping, and she clenched her fists so hard that she stuck a fingernail into the palm of her hand. A drop of blood emerged drew an irregular line on the palm of her hand. After this, nothing. She remained silent in front of Tom for a long time, while he, under the effect of the Sedum, slept pleased.
Tom´s Story Page 7
