The rest of the evening was very normal. When it was the kids’ bedtime, they said their prayers and their folks tucked them in. The only thing out of the ordinary was John’s deep and sincere apology to his son.
Then, the parents sat together on the sofa and spoke in low voices. Tammy started it.
“All right, John, now we can talk. What really happened? You know, I didn’t buy that bullshit you gave Steven. But since you chose a lie like that, it must have been something even worse.”
She did not accuse, but her tone gave notice only the truth would do—and she would know an untruth if she heard it.
They had been together their whole lives. She was the younger by a mere five hours. They had been in the same hospital nursery together. They’d been in the same class from kindergarten right through high school graduation. They’d never looked for anyone else. Soul mates they were, from birth to death or they both believed, as did all who knew them.
He told her the complete truth, actually fighting back tears of shame at confessing out loud, to himself as much as her, the horror of what he had done. He remembered quite well the sudden altered state of mind, the way as he said it, his soul departed from him, leaving him a mere creature of savage intent until it returned to him too late to prevent the crime.
They shared a worried silence, which she finally nudged away.
“And you’ve never felt even a hint of anything like that before?”
“Never! It’s like it wasn’t even me! I felt no love for Stevie, or for anything else. Just a savage desire to mar his leg—to give it a good scar so it would look less like a girl’s and more like an active boy’s. And I knew it would hurt. That was part of the urge! To cause pain! To mar the leg, but also to hurt!
“My God, Tammy,” he sighed, with depressed surrender, “I’ve become a monster.”
“No! You were a monster for a few minutes! And then you weren’t, and now you aren’t! I know you feel terrible about it, and I’d be horrified if you didn’t. But it was one time! There’s probably some kind of term for this kind of thing...probably French or Latin. We’ll do an Internet search tomorrow and see what we can find. Chances are this one little episode is all there’ll ever be.”
But there was no Latin phrase. No support groups for people that lost their minds to a vicious other self for mere moments and then returned.
Though he lived in dread all day Sunday when there was no recurrence, he relaxed. As the days went on, he relaxed even more. Soon, he and Tammy began to accept it had been just a one-time thing.
* * *
July 9
10:30 p.m. The kids had been asleep for an hour. Tammy had been teasingly sexy all day. John had caught her mood and matched it. They’d been kissing and groping urgently on the couch, then hurried to bed, eager, laughing, tossing clothing merrily around the room and then clinching on the bed. She was already warm and wet, and he went into her immediately, and they came together at once in happy gasps.
A short rest was giggly and playful, and then he began to make love to her in their favorite way. He kissed her everywhere, beginning on her forehead and spending a long time at her lips and chin and cheeks. He loved her neck and throat, immersing his face in the soft fragrant falls of her dark brown hair. His hands were never still, caressing every inch of her with soft possessiveness and delighting in the arching response to every touch. He loved her breasts. They had found out over a decade before tongue kissing and sucking on her nipples could bring her near to orgasm, even with her womanhood untouched. He continued downward, finally, devoting more minutes to her flat stomach and the curve of her waist, and then to the delightful area between her legs. He kissed her thighs, and her knees, and her calves. Kneeling, he took one foot in his hand, almost reverently, and
[flip]
settled on the exact spot. He held it there, unmoving, for some seconds, anticipating the sensation.
Tammy was laying back, breathing hard and reveling in his touching of every part of her, anticipating the wonderful comings he would soon gift her with.
He bit savagely, deeply, into the soft tissue on the outside of her foot.
She screamed at the sudden, piercing agony in her foot and tried to yank it away even as she looked.
He clutched her foot to his mouth, blood running from between his lips and down his chin. He shook her foot like a dog shakes a chew toy, bruising her ankle with the vice of his hand and fingers.
She screamed again, and lashed out with the other foot, kicking him hard in the temple with her heel. He loosed his grip and almost fell sideways, then hopped off the bed and looked at her as a fox regards a chicken that fights back. He licked her blood from his lips with relish, then bared his teeth and reached for her arm this time, catching the wrist, ignoring her pathetic attempt to
[flip]
His eyes widened. He put his hand to his chest, and it came away red from the blood spotting the thick curly blonde hairs. He met her eyes with a look of horrified self-hatred she would never forget. He turned then and rushed to the adjacent bathroom. She heard him retching into the toilet even as she grabbed a section of the top sheet and pressed it hard against the side of her foot. It hurt like fire and ice.
She heard the water running in the sink. A minute after it stopped, he emerged slumped and drained. He flicked on the light. Her blood had been scrubbed off his face and chest; beads of water glistened from both. His blood was also gone from his face. She had never seen anyone so pale. He came closer, tentatively, like an ownerless dog approaching an offered petting. He would not meet her eyes. She saw some of the wetness on his face was tears.
“John, I need a little help here. Don’t want to get blood on the carpet.”
He reached across her and grabbed his pillow. The thought exploded within her that now he would try to smother her, and she tensed for the struggle.
He stripped the case from the pillow, tossing the latter aside, and hastily made a bandage of the case. Gently, he moved her hand and the clutched sheet away from the foot and looked at it. He sobbed and wrapped the case tightly around the seeping wounds. He picked her up in his arms, reminiscent of when he’d carried her over the threshold of their first rented apartment eleven years before, and bore her into the bathroom, setting her gently on the side of the tub, her feet near the spigot. He turned on the cold water, and she held her foot underneath, gasping at the renewal of pain, but letting the water rinse away blood while the cold decreased the bleeding.
John sat on the tub edge over a foot away from her. His face was in his hands.
She could hear his weeping. She reached out and touched his bare back. “John? Love? Please stop. I know that wasn’t you. It was something…someone...else. You could never hurt me of your own free will.”
He raised a face that shame and grief had remade into something she barely recognized. “But it was me, Tam. I knew exactly what I was doing. I considered it, planned it, and I fucking enjoyed it! While I pretended to kiss your instep, I debated about where to do it. Nothing that would incapacitate you. Tam, I thought I could bite off a toe, but that would put you off your feet too long! 'Bitch has to work', I thought to myself. And then, 'but damn, it would be fun.'
"And then when I figured out the spot, I thought—I can hardly even say it—'She’d limp for a couple of days, but, fuck it, she’d have her ass back to work on Monday.'"
He turned away from her in misery. “Like I said, a goddamned monster.”
Half an hour later, the foot adequately first-aided, they lay in bed together, his head pillowed on her shoulder. “God, Tam. How can you ever trust me to make love to you again?”
She could not answer. She’d been wondering the same thing.
III
Frank Jameson had always been completely and irrevocably insane; a psychotic sociopath of the first order; an aberration; an example of inhuman viciousness and evil.
His parents blamed, with no logical reason, the circumstances of his birth. On the way home
from a quick vacation, his mother went into labor early, and they’d had to stop in the small town of Dillon, Nebraska. She’d given birth quickly and as easily as possible. There was no reason to believe any brain damage had been caused. And certainly there was no hint their child suffered from some mental malformation as he lay in the nursery with the local boy and girl that had been born on their exact due date the day before.
But before he was two, they suspected. Every child goes through a biting phase, but it seldom lasts long, and a few quick corrections usually teaches the child what is acceptable to bite and what—or who—is not.
Little Frankie never got the message. He bit every chance he got. Sharp slaps across the mouth were lessons learned for minutes only. He was like a feral dog, abused and conditioned that could not help itself.
The biting finally tempered, but it never ceased entirely. Even into adulthood, if something animate, like a finger or an ear, human or otherwise, came too close to his mouth, the chances were good it would be bitten. Bitten through, if possible.
But the biting tempered primarily because those around him learned to avoid it. Other things took its place. At four, he set fire to his parents’ bed while they were asleep. They survived with only minor scars on their feet and hands.
He was fascinated by water. He was delighted to discover that small animals could not breathe under water, and would soon stop moving. He learned the word for this was dying. He managed to get many things to die, from baby birds to earthworms to kittens.
His first visit to a psychologist was after the arson. He should have been committed then, but the doctor was reluctant to do so and his parents, miserable and fearful as they had become, still shunned that necessary step. They tried treatment. It was like treating a rattlesnake to condition it not to strike, except a rattlesnake has no talent for deception.
Frank Jameson was actually an intelligent child, and curious. At age five, he noticed the odd similarities between snow and sand and water. They flowed, they covered, they peaked and dipped in the wind. What else might they do? Could a person, say, drown in sand? He would find out.
That’s when he was committed. This was little consolation to the family of the three year old boy Frankie had smothered to death in the sandbox, kneeling on his back as he held the child’s face under the sand.
Twenty-eight years later, he was not fundamentally changed. The only home he knew was the fifth floor of the Nebraska State Mental Hospital, only about six miles from where the rest of his family still lived. They hadn’t visited in a very long time, though he still got Christmas and birthday presents mailed to him every year. It was always clothing or other soft and harmless things.
At exactly 2:27 pm. CDT, June 26, as if someone had flipped a switch, Frank Jameson acquired his soul.
It was a day like every other. The television, held safely to the wall, high up, droned on with the stress-free blather of soap operas and game shows. Most of the inmates watched simply because there was little else to occupy them.
Frank Jameson was contemplating biting a chunk out of another inmate’s ear. He strode purposefully across the room, approaching his intended victim from behind.
The two large orderlies, Robert and Martin, were instantly alert and began to move to intercept. They knew Frank well enough to recognize the purposeful walk.
Frank noticed but was unable and unwilling to change his
[flip]
He remembered biting his sister’s finger until only the bone kept his small child’s teeth from meeting. He remembered her screams; the screams of his mother, and the horrified look in his father’s eyes. He remembered the stricken desperate grief Emily had in her eyes from then on, whenever she looked at him.
For the first time in his life, from grief and regret, Frank Jameson cried. He stood on the floor, barely a foot behind his intended victim, hid his face in his hands and wept.
Other images flooded his suddenly vulnerable mind. Softy, the kitten struggling feebly beneath the water in the bathtub as he held her there, the last tiny bubble that rose from her little kitten nose as her struggles ceased. His sobs shook his frail back and forced themselves into actual voice in his throat.
Robert and Martin exchanged wide-eyed looks of shock and disbelief. They both glanced up at the camera near the television as if to reassure themselves this unprecedented event would be recorded.
For many of the inmates, sudden weeping was not that big of a deal. Common occurrence. For Frank Jameson though, it was as unlikely and unexpected as a sudden stream of filthy epithets from a television evangelist. It was as incongruous as human laughter from the face of a cobra.
The other inmates looked on with slack-jawed shock, or giggled with delighted surprise, or cringed in sudden terror, each according to their own personal demons. For almost four minutes, the occupants were frozen like the subjects in a painting by a very disturbed Norman Rockwell.
Then, the moment was over with the suddenness of a power outage. But Frank’s irresistible urge to bite had passed and he shrugged, befuddled by the decidedly unwelcome and unfamiliar emotions that had assaulted him, and he walked back to the chair and plopped heavily down on the overstuffed cushions.
When interviewed the following day, he freely admitted to the experience, but could shed no light on a why or how.
But on July 9, at 11:30 p.m., his peaceful sleep and silent but violent dreaming was shattered by explosions of remorseful memories, regrets, and, worst of all, empathy! The unbearable grief wrung a wail of agonizing self-loathing from his throat, and the graveyard shift orderlies, James and Alan, ran to his tiny cell and looked in.
Frank Jameson was sitting up on his bed. Tears streamed down his face as he blubbered like an injured toddler. Alan stayed to observe while James went back to his post. Alan did not, however, disturb the patient. No one ever approached Frank without absolute necessity to spur them to it.
Frank vividly remembered the dying of his playmate, the pathetic thrashings of the smaller boy and the muffled cries that barely escaped the sand that finally drowned him. Other memories assaulted him, but in their midst, was the non-memory image of a beautiful dark-haired woman. Her smiling features banished the savaging memories for all of a few seconds, then gave way to them and winked out. And the horrible feelings of sympathy and regret ceased suddenly as if someone had flipped a switch.
V
Whether simply by luck or by the contrivance of some greater power, Amy was spared, and never did really understand what was happening to her father.
Others weren’t so lucky. The next-door neighbors’ Chihuahua disappeared one day. It was found three days later, cut in half by a saw and left lying in the alley behind their house. A high school cross-country runner was doing his early evening run on some of the back roads outside of town. When he was two hours late returning home, his parents went searching. They found him. He was alive, but unconscious along the side of the road and suffering from a broken leg and a broken hip, obviously the victim of a hit-and-run. Tire marks indicated the contact was intentional and from behind.
It had long been John Fuller’s habit to take a three-mile run around the high school track every other weekday afternoon. One day, he added a half-mile, and so shared the track for the first time with a very old woman dutifully walking her own daily mile. She had barely begun when John felt that [flip] in his mind. He came up behind her and shoved her hard in the back, sending her sprawling on her face and her thick trifocals flying down the track. John literally ran over her, placing one foot on her back and kicking the side of her head. He then stomped on the glasses and ran on, exiting the track. She never did see her assailant clearly, but she heard the gleeful laughter that ran off with him.
Obviously, the several treatments and strategies provided by Max Lovell were not working. Max was a young man with a brand new degree in psychiatry and a sincere desire to help his patients. He hated the very thought of committing someone to, as he called them, prisons of convenience f
or those we can’t understand.
Nevertheless, he had suggested the possibility at their first meeting. Right away, it seemed to him that John was a danger to others. Tammy had pleaded with him to at least delay that horrible step, and try outpatient therapy first. Few men could resist Tammy's pleas, when her sincere blue eyes held theirs and her voice had that quaver of agonized beseeching. Max was not one of those few.
Those last two incidents with the high school runner and the old woman, reported ashamedly but accurately by John, gave Max a different view. This patient was no doubt a severe threat to others, and he’d best be taken out of the population for the sake of everyone else. It was easier because Tammy was not present.
She was home. She’d attended the first few visits, but then Max had insisted she stay away. Psychiatric counseling was best done one-on-one. So this day, she was home, organizing the kids’ clothes for school, which started in a week. She had not the slightest inkling her soul mate was leaving her, perhaps forever.
“Max, what makes it even worse are the horrible visions that come along with the changes. They’re like memories, but of things that never happened. Like drowning my sister’s kitten, or biting her finger almost through. I’ve never had a sister! Never had a kitten! Flashes of these false memories last only a second or two, but stay with me forever. Like some savage spirit is taking me over, and these are its memories. And always, the feelings that accompany those visions are pleased satisfaction!”
John was hunched forward in his chair. He put his face in his hands. “I think I need to be committed. Get my sick ass off the streets and out of my house before I do something even worse. If I have to sign something, let’s do it right now while I’m still me, and call the cops or whoever to transport me to the nut farm. Right now.”
Max was not too surprised that John’s resolve suddenly matched his own. John Fuller, as himself, was one of the most stable and decent people Max had ever met. His short blonde hair and cheerful blunt features reflected exactly the kind of man he was. Solid, caring, selfless—loving his children more than anything on earth with one exception: Tammy, whom he adored with an almost worshipful devotion. Max had wondered if this devotion had caused an imbalance in their relationship, and these incidents were somehow the result of John’s subconscious rebelling against a feeling of servitude.
Dark Light Book Three (Dark Light Anthology) Page 21
