“I couldn’t convince you -“
“No.” She sipped her coffee. Returned her hand, the right one, immediately beneath the afghan. Belachek could see she was massaging her left with it. “He let me live. Why? I don’t know, perhaps so I could carry his pestilent seed to fruition. The police arrested him, but, like his son, he escaped. En route to prison, he fled. He raped and murdered two teenage girls in as many weeks. When he was captured, he was sent to prison in chains. He was hung shortly thereafter.”
Belachek scribbled in his notebook. It was much better than he’d hoped for. “And then…”
“And then nine months later, Andrei came into the world. A sweet, beautiful child. Conceived, yes, conceived in horror, but touched by the angels nonetheless. I loved my child, Mister Belachek. He was a fine boy, very smart, very loveable, very outgoing. But then things changed.” Her face had gone rubbery and slack, yellow like a mask. “Puberty is what did it. He was a normal child in all ways until then. Back then, the nineteen fifties, nobody had much of an inkling into what made men turn into monsters, what the warning signs were. Not like today, where it’s a veritable science.”
Belachek licked his lips. “But you began to notice… irregularities?”
“Yes. He was murdering animals. First, family pets disappeared and then, soon enough, neighborhood animals. He was hanging them out in the woods, enjoying their pathetic little deaths. Yes, the onset of puberty turned my lovely little boy into a monster.”
“A monster?” Belachek seemed offended by this. “Troubled, surely, but a monster?”
“Yes!” Ida Swanson’s words were like a pistol shot. “A monster, Mister Belachek. People who are frightened of going out of doors, who talk to imaginary companions — these people are troubled. My son was a fiend. It was his inheritance, you see, from his father, a genetic curse that puberty freed. Don’t you see that? He was a normal, healthy child before that. There was nothing to suggest the perverted, freakish deviant he would become.”
Belachek was not writing now. He looked disturbed by such talk. “Go on.”
The old lady rocked slowly. “Then came a flurry of incidents. He was exposing himself at school, trying to talk the girls into aberrant practices. And, of course, still killing animals. He attacked one of our maids, tried to rape her. He led a twelve-year old girl away from a playground, his intentions obvious, but, thankfully, her father arrived and gave Andrei a good thrashing. But it didn’t stop him. Not at all. Things got worse…”
“Did they?” Belachek’s notebook was open in his lap. Nothing in it but doodling.
“Yes, far worse. Hideous occurrences.”
“Yes, yes, hideous, you say?” Belachek said, excited now, very excited. He was sweating, his heart pounding as the old lady gave him all the gruesome details. He had an erection, but he was unaware of it, knowing only that his palms were wet, that his skin seemed too tight for the bulging, bloody mechanisms beneath. In his belly there was a raw, inhuman hunger. “Go on, go on, yes…” his words dripped from his lips.
If Ida Swanson was aware, she gave no indication of the same. She continued on in a flat, dead tone. “…thankfully, no one was hurt. Not yet. It came to a head, you see. I discovered, in an unused woodshed out back, that Andrei had been collecting the heads of animals. Some were fresh, others nearly mummified. It was out of control, this savage beast within him. It hungered and demanded more and more by the day.” She was visibly shaking now. Belachek was on the edge of his seat. “I cornered him, told him he was going to be sent to a sanitarium, that he was sick.”
“And… and what happened then?” Belachek demanded. His tape recorder fell, dropped to the hardwood floor. He didn’t even notice. “Tell me what happened then! I have to know what happened…”
“Yes, of course you do. He attacked me with a straight razor. Even then, apparently, it was his weapon of choice. He slashed me brutally, paying special attention to my eyes. Then he ran off. I was blinded by his brutality. I have not seen the light of day since that horrible afternoon.” She stopped, breathing hard, forcing herself to be calm. “No, I haven’t seen him since, Mister Belachek. But he’s not dead. I know that. Even after he escaped from prison, he was killing. Constantly. He can’t help himself. I haven’t seen my son since that day, that depraved, vicious monster… until now.”
Belachek froze, the razor in his hands. “You knew,” he hissed. “You knew all the time!”
“Of course, I knew. You think a mother doesn’t know her own son? You think using your father’s name wouldn’t tip me off?” She was not frightened, just fixed with deadly purpose. “And now you’ve come back… to finish what you started?”
Belachek was giggling now, drooling. He advanced with the razor, bits of light sparkling off the fine-edged blade. “For the book, for myself, for you, mother…”
Ida Swanson — remembering the sweet, precious boy she’d once had before the darkness swallowed him, vomited back out this demon — let the afghans fall from her lap. In one arthritic claw, her right one, was a revolver. A small, sleek .38. Andrei Belachek froze, then lunged. The .38 spat a slug into him. It caught him in the belly, propelling him back onto the sofa, an ocean of red flooding its banks. The next slug caught him in the chest. The third in the throat. The fourth and fifth in the head. Belachek, still looking stunned and shocked by it all, slumped down into the cushions and went still.
Lana came into the room. “All done, then?”
“Yes,” the blind woman said. “Yes.”
“Very well then.” She took the gun from the old woman, began bundling Belachek’s corpse up. “The sofa’s ruined, I’m afraid. Worth the price, I assume.”
Ida Swanson looked ancient. “It’s done now. What should have been done forty years ago was done today,” she said and said no more.
Lana, after bundling Belachek up nicely so he wouldn’t leak, pulled her burden away. Its ultimate destination was the furnace in the cellar, where she would feed the worthless remains of Andrei Belachek into the flames piece by piece.
About the Author
Tim Curran is a new writer having placed stories in The Edge, Darkness Within, 3-Lobed Burning Eye, Hardboiled, Burning Sky, and Black Rose. He has other stories coming out in the anthologies Mad Love, More Fungi from Yuggoth, and Extremes 3. Writing mostly crime, horror, mystery and suspense, he lives in Michigan, toils in a factory by day, and scribbles by night.