Speak No Evil_ A Novel - Allison Brennan [20]
“I don’t, Mama,” he always said. “I don’t even look.”
“Don’t lie to me. Men look. All of ’em want to fuck every bitch that crosses their path. Isn’t that why your daddy got into so much trouble? The whores. He was weak. He fell under their spell. Like those women of myth. What are they called?”
“The Sirens.”
“Exactly! Sexpots, luring men. Sirens.” She seemed proud of him somehow, in a way he never understood. “You’re a smart one, aren’t you? Smart enough to stay away from the Sirens. If only your father had listened to me.”
He ached. He wanted to talk to his father so bad. Dad would understand. The feelings. The darkness.
His father had been a great man. Great but weak, Mama said.
“Don’t you be a weak man. Don’t give in to those harlots. They only want to torment you with their titties and their twats. Don’t touch or they’ll cry rape so fast you’ll be in prison before you know it. Sluts, all of them.”
He would never be weak.
And when he touched them, they would never cry rape.
Angie would never say another word.
He locked the door, slid the deadbolt. Closed all the curtains. Double checked the doors and windows and curtains. Better safe. And then, only when he was certain no one could walk in, he brought the box of tapes to his bedroom. Shut and locked that door, too.
The tapes had been his father’s. He’d seen his father with them before, though he’d not known what was on them until after his father disappeared. Left without a good-bye. He’d only been a kid then, and he’d had a lot of time to think about it.
The Sirens.
They’d lured him away, made him desert his family, his sons.
He used to sit in his daddy’s closet just to smell him. Remember him and wish for something . . . more. He never knew exactly what, but he knew if his dad would come back everything would be different, better. Over time the Dad scent faded. Then they moved, and everything about his father was gone. He’d grown up and the memories became fuzzy, so he thought hard, trying to bring them back. He wasn’t certain all his memories were true, but they comforted him, so he kept them close.
The tapes had been in his daddy’s closet. Five of them in a shoe box, far in the corner, buried under boxes his mother had packed when his father hadn’t returned.
Each tape was fifteen to twenty minutes long. Dark and fuzzy, old, colorless. But he knew what was going on. He knew what the faceless man in the picture was doing.
Head buzzing, he turned off all the lights except the desk lamp, which cast long shadows across his immaculate room. Took off all his clothes. He was hard with anticipation, his penis quivering. He stared at himself, picturing how he’d looked in the mirror at the head of his bed when he slid into Angie’s body.
He’d come immediately, the excitement overtaking him.
The second time he’d forced himself in her he couldn’t come. Angry, he didn’t know why. But it wasn’t the same. So he took a beer bottle and shoved it up her cunt. Her body arched; her vocal cords strained in her neck. He watched her neck, enthralled, the faint scream deep in her chest turning him on like fucking her hadn’t.
He came.
Licking his lips, sweating, he slid the tape into the VCR.
The woman was naked on a bare dirty mattress. Because the film was black and white, he didn’t know if the stains were dirt, urine, or blood. Her hands tied to the headboard. Tears on her face. Her mouth opened.
He heard no scream because the tape was soundless, but he saw her body jerk, fighting the restraints, her throat tense, revealing the bones in her slender neck.
A man came partially into view, his face obscured by the shadows. He might have been thirty, a little older. He wore a dark T-shirt, no pants. His penis stood out in front of him. He fucked her. His hands went around her neck.
Fixated on the tape, he pulled at his own penis harder. Harder, to the