“Look at this, look at fucken this. Have you forgotten?” She was holding both sides of her stomach. “This is your baby in here in case you hadn’t noticed, no one else’s, but not for much longer, you fuck. You don’t deserve this and now you’re not getting it.”
Her hands formed into fists and she began to thump on her stomach like a gorilla beats its chest, Dup, Dup, Dup, Dup, Dup, and she shrieked something he couldn’t comprehend.
It was shocking to witness the ferocity with which she punched her stomach. He rushed forward, grabbed both her arms and pinned them by her sides. “What the fuck are you doing? Stop it! Jesus, this is madness. Stop.”
She continued struggling against him when he noticed a white dribble run from her nose. She sniffed and it vanished from view.
“Let me go. Let me fucken go. Nowwwww,” she screamed.
“Please, just calm down. Calm the fuck down and I’ll let you go.”
“I’m calm. Now let me go.”
He looked at her sceptically, released his grip on her arms, and stepped back away. She swung and connected with his face.
He watched her walk toward the door and then turn back to face him. “No. I am going to have this baby, but listen to me now when I tell you. I’m going to make you pay for what you’ve done to me. You’re going to wish-to-fuck it was never born by the time I’m finished.”
Lilith slammed the door behind.
7:
“Old King Cole was a merry old soul.
“Before he snorted the coke.”
Liam leaned back on the chair, and put a hand over his closed eyes. He struggled to control the spinning sensation going on in his mind. Another groan developed into a low, self-pitying hum as he shook his head to dissolve the memories of where it all began and how it ended up.
He eased back the shutters over his eyes and viewed the white powder spread out in front of him. It felt like a long time ago since he’d had his last snort. He tossed the potent powder with his index finger so that it, again, spread out evenly, and rubbed the residue from his finger over his gums. He picked up the plastic tube and put it to his nostril, pressing the other one closed as he bent over the powder. He did the same up the other nostril until his lungs filled to capacity. He dropped the tubing to the table and pinched both nostrils tightly shut and let the pressure on his lungs blast out of his mouth.
The chair leaned back on two legs as he stretched his arms against the table. His teeth clenched tight as his body stiffened with the hit, his head fell back beyond his shoulders and his eyes closed once again. His breathing became erratic; he inhaled and exhaled in short bursts through his teeth, which ended with a growl as he fought to keep it together.
He lifted his hands from the table and the chair hit the floor with a soft thump, jolting his head forward. When he opened his eyes, he focused on nothing in particular. Although his eyes remained open, he could have been sitting in a seat at the cinema when the lights dimmed to dark before the start of the main event. The effects of blindness didn’t bother him.
When his mind settled down within the dark depressions of his derelict theatre, a single red dot, set in the centre of a boundless pitch-black screen, demanded his full attention. The red dot appeared to grow and move toward him from the depths of space and time. Two more red dots appeared on either side of the first, smaller, suggesting they were just behind, then another two, smaller again, and then one more. They continued to float toward him, taking on the V-formation of a flock of migrating birds. And as they got closer he saw that they weren’t dots at all, but little red squares, still growing in size. No, they weren’t squares. They were red cubes, spinning on their axis, still growing, still flying toward him, six in total. They stopped in front of him like a 3D production, huge now, almost on top of him to make him want to sit back, floating on the blackness, hiding the boundless screen behind but for the narrow gaps between them. They were beautiful in colour, warm and inviting, soothing and tranquil, with smooth, curved corners and perfect straight lines, spinning in unison, effortlessly, like a ballerina turns on her toes.
Then they began to rearrange their formation within the confines of a perfect circle. One was prominent at the front with the rest falling neatly behind. They slowed to a stop and once again they became squares. The perfect lines of the square out front began to split and separate, and shimmering white light emerged between the cracks and the face of the cube fell forward and down but didn’t detach from the lower edge. The sides folded out concealing the others behind and the lid lifted up. The cube now formed a bright white cross among the blackness. The cross went back to being a square and swapped clockwise for the next to come forward and take its place. Each one took a turn doing the same as the first, bringing with it a message, an instruction, and an order from God.
8:
“It’s raining, it’s pouring,
“Mother stopped her snoring.”
Liam never blinked his eyes until, that is, the curtains to his private screening closed and the darkness pulled away to allow the light from the kitchen to re-enter his shameful life. The kitchen settled down when the blinking stopped. He could see once again and the depression that had consumed him was now replenished with purpose. Gone were the blunt emotions and back came the euphoria after many years of absence. A message from God could do that to a person, he knew that now. Few would ever experience how he felt right now.
He didn’t look as good as he felt; the skin on his face was a sickly shade of silver. The only vibrant colour left was around the eyes, the sockets red and raw, with dilated pupils that reflected only what his mind wanted him to see. Things began to move faster for him now. There was a strong sense of urgency flowing through his veins. His stomach felt warm inside. It all made perfect sense, the answer to all their problems, an opportunity for divine retribution and forgiveness. He hardly had to think about it. Simplified reminders, single words, for each of the six holy crosses lingered to the fore of his consciousness. The first spelt:
- NOTE -
Liam got up from the chair and went across to the drawers located to the left of the sink. Blind hands opened the second drawer down and rummaged until he found a pen and pad of paper. He scribbled a few lines down, separated the top sheet and stood the page up against the silver face of the tea pot.
With no time to spare, the second word read:
- PREPARATION -
Liam left the kitchen, went through the living room, up the stairs, and onto the landing. His movements were automatic and his expression frozen. Everything thus far played out well. He was doing a damn fine job and was eager to keep it going. God would be pleased.
He did not notice the snoring coming from behind the closed door. He opened the door to the cistern. Some clothes and a couple of towels where strewn across the boiler and on top of wrack shelving. Just inside the door and to the left was a meter-long stick with a hook screwed into the end. Everything was where it was supposed to be.
He took the stick, closed the door, and reached it to the ceiling to hook the handle of the attic door. The springs pronged and twanged as they stretched, making loud, rustic, discordant noises like a piano full of cutlery. The metal joints creaked and whined as the stairs came down. The snoring arrangement in the bedroom stopped as he ascended into the attic. But he needn’t worry. God was taking care of her.
The snoring started again.
The attic had been converted with basic wooden flooring made of plywood and nailed to the rafters. Boxes of various sizes and a few suitcases were dropped around the sides, tucked between the floor and the slanting roof. Most of its contents were filled with junk and appliances never used. It made for an effective place to hide something you wanted to keep secret.
He turned on a battery-operated light attached to a roof beam. Stooping down, he fumbled around the back of some boxes and recovered a long, brown case with two c
ombination locks. He brought the case back underneath the light where there was more floor space, turned the dials to the correct sequence of numbers and opened it.
Inside was a 12-gauge double-barrel shotgun secured in light foam. It looked more like a sawn-off shotgun due to its size. Ten cartridges were also set back in foam, neatly lined up in the top right corner. The shotgun had been in the family for a couple of generations, handed down to him by his father, and his father before him.
The actual term given to the shotgun was a “coach gun.” His father had taken him out hunting rabbits when he was just a boy, around the age Eamon was now. He had told Eamon the stories his father had told him about the gun and the Wild West. Eamon had enjoyed those stories in a happier time.
It was a break-open gun and with a decisive stroke he located the barrel breach latch and lowered the barrel away from the body. The action was smooth, a soft click. He loaded two cartridges, one into each barrel of the gun. He brought the barrel back up until he heard it click softly back into place. The coach gun was loaded.
With preparation complete, he again saw the word of the third holy cross:
- CAUSE -
Standing back outside the bedroom door, the ladder down behind him, he could hear Lilith’s snores on the other side. His hand pressed down on the handle. With the shotgun supported by his right arm, his hand grasping the barrel, he entered the bedroom and closed the door behind him. The curtains were closed. A crack of light peered through, enough to see where he was going. He stepped on more clothes than carpet as he made his way to the far side of the bed and up to the bedside cabinet.
The third white cross had depicted his wife’s position exactly as he found her. He was doing the right thing. God will be pleased.
She was lying on her stomach with her head on the edge of the mattress. Dribble seeped from her mouth. One arm extended over the side of the bed with her fingers almost touching the floor. The bandage had slipped down her arm exposing a near septic wound he paid no attention to. The other arm lay down by her side with the palm of her hand facing the ceiling. The lower part of her was in the recovery position. How ironic.
He didn’t see his wife, all he could see now was the CAUSE; the cause of all the fear, dread, horror, panic, and shock that had gone on in this Godforsaken house. But worse than that, the Cause had turned him into the abuser, and now the Cause was about to turn him into something else: The Executioner.
The forth white cross spelt out the next righteous instruction:
- REDEMPTION -
He held the shotgun in both hands and positioned the barrel of the shotgun down and into her mouth. The barrel pressed against the inside gum, forcing her head to twist until the rest of her body followed suit, and she now lay on her back. The barrel slipped out of her mouth as she turned her head away.
Her sleepy tongue lapped at the side of her mouth, scraping away at a rustic taste she had yet to recognise, and the lazy arm that had been hanging off the bed was now reaching for her face, dirty bloody fingers absently wiping at a foreign object no longer there.
The snoring had stopped, replaced by sleepy moans and groans.
He mounted the bed and straggled onto her, just below the waist, careful not to push his weight upon her. The only sign of his presence was the sinking of the mattress; it mattered not. Leaning over his wife once again, he levered the barrel of the gun back into her mouth and used it to position her head square in front of him.
The Cause stirred.
Liam cocked one of two external hammers.
A subtle click sounded.
The Cause opened its eyes.
Her pupils expanded, pressing back the hazel-coloured irises to let in as much light as the dimly lit room would allow. What light there was hit both lenses simultaneously and passed through to the innermost part of the eye to convert into electrical impulses that moved to the brain for processing. All at once she was staring down the barrel of a gun. A gun similar to the one her husband said he had gotten rid of some years back. Beyond was the silhouette of head and shoulders, a grim reaper of sorts.
The gun went off.
The room illuminated like flash powder from an old-fashioned camera. The burning charge divided among the two dozen shot pellets and spread marginally upon leaving the barrel. The recoil of the shotgun pushed into the shoulder of the reaper as the shot exploded into the back of her throat. The mouth filled with a blast of hot air, blowing up the cheeks like the thick wall of rubber and ignited the orifice. Molten pellets burned and cut through bone and melted the soft cavity tissue. The gums broke apart—more disintegrated—and the lower jaw separated with a bounce from the rest of the body.
The room was bright, the terror unexpected and abrupt, the spectacle inconceivable. It was as if time suddenly froze to let her mind speed up when she should have been dead. The flame and smoke of the gun stood still in the air and then moved in ever-so-slow motion. The head and shoulders belonged to a crazy man, a Reaper, with a bucket full of snarling teeth. An inch of the smoke at the end of the barrel looked more like off-white plastic, stagnant and suspended in the air like a curly icicle falling to the ceiling. Back to the crazy man, the Reaper, familiar to her, the light beginning to fade to dim, but not before she recognised him behind the trigger. Ample time was afforded to her to study his murderous demeanour.
And then she left the picture behind. The room rotated in a series of snapshots: the head and shoulders again of that, the nicotine ceiling, the back wall with a dirty, framed print of a sunflower she’d never really liked but couldn’t be bothered to replace, the bed below, the wardrobe ahead. There was more in-between, plenty more; she made out every dark detail that her line of vision crossed.
She knew the crown of her head hit something hard but couldn’t feel it, then slump onto something soft. The only stimulus came from the cuticles of thin hair that pressed and pushed from one side, and then the other. Then that stimulus was gone, too.
She felt no pain. Nothing. Nada. It was much worse than that.
What was left of her, she realised, was perched upright on the long-time spare pillow that occupied the right side of the bed. Her eyes moved effortlessly from right to left, as they had always done when attached to the rest of her, to where her murderous husband sat on her decapitated body. The shotgun was firmly clasped in both hands but more toward him than before lift-off.
This part of her, sitting pretty on the pillow, could not feel his weight press down upon her torso, but she suspected what was left behind could. Happening at a rate of a quasi-frozen pace, it took an unquantifiable amount of time to register that her body still had life in it, too. The legs kicked out from beneath her husband and the arms came up from the sides to reach for the barrel, and made a grip, but fell away as he pulled the barrel of the gun back and rested it on his shoulder as if lining up in a military parade. She wanted to divert her eyes to other parts of the room. Sorry for the state of herself and nothing else, this time her eyes didn’t budge.
Lilith’s mind was operating at a subatomic level where the classical ideas about gravity and space and time no longer applied. She had entered into a new and unfamiliar world. In this world, time existed in nanoseconds, one billionth of a second from the world she just departed. What might seem like instant death in that world did not hold true in this.
She could not pinpoint the time she could no longer see. It was such a long time ago since the darkness consumed her. She should have been dead, maybe she already was, and if so, it wasn’t so bad. There was something in this darkness, a blackness, blacker than any black she had ever seen. It wanted her to know it as “Feeler, blacker than a black cat buried in a Bible, blacker than her own Sin.”
Her mind was resting on its body, soft and aero-bubbly, pulsing up and down, and it was comforting her, massaging over the top of her mind with gloopy-like tentacles
that pressed and caressed in soothing circles, as if it had found a new best friend, a girl with a new doll, a boy with a new puppy, hugged and stroked to death.
A 4D projector kicked into action, a cinematic experience unlike any other enveloped her very soul, presenting itself in a manner whereby all her senses were back on track. Time had a parallel feel to the lifetime she had left behind. But this life offered nothing except cruelty and sexual abuses for company, to be done unto her as she had done unto her only son. It punished her over, and over, and over. . . .
The Feeler was no longer the friend she had come to adore, a girl playing with a doll, a boy with a puppy. The Feeler had become a Feeder. The same shapeless tentacle that had pressed and caressed in soothing circles now scavenged at the recesses of her mind with minute bites to ever so slowly devour a sanity that had long since passed.
When the Feeder finished, there was nothing left of her but a nonchalant existence in a place of black, still and quiet with no way to let anyone know of her existence, EVER.
- EFFECT -
She was the Cause, he was the Effect. She would go the Hell. He would be redeemed to Heaven. This is how it was meant to be. This was the word of the Lord.
A feeling of enlightenment lifted his body, a ton of weighted abuse absent from his soul. The fine shower of blood that sprayed his hands and face washed away his sins. It felt as refreshing as a water-bomb fight on a hot summer’s day.
Mounted on the corpse of the Cause, he took a few seconds to cherish this very special moment. The fifth holy white cross allowed for that but he wanted to move on, eager for his praise when he met God.
He thought now that he should have removed his uniform. It was bloody. That was no way to present himself before God. But it wasn’t in the instruction so maybe God wanted to see the laboured results of his efforts. And besides, many others had blown themselves up and they got there just fine. Maybe there was a special conveyer belt he could go on where angels would get him to stand with his arms and legs apart and his bloody uniform would miraculously strip away from his body, and soapy holy water would wash over him where blessed cloths and towels would clean and dry him. At the end the clean, pressed uniform would be put back on with a spray of fragrance and a comb would brush his hair, ready for the meeting. And God was going to tell him what a great job he had done and he could have whatever he wanted for the rest of eternity and he would meet up with his loved ones and martyrs who had made it to heaven because they too had done great things and they would share each other’s wealth and wishes with those who came after them and his son and their families were all going to be well looked after and never have to worry and all he had to do for all of this was pull the trigger one more time, and take another life.
The Ice Scream Man Page 5
