Gerald was the only father I ever knew, but he wasn’t my real father. I would have never been so bold as to say that, of course. “You’re not my real dad!” That whole thing. It just wasn’t going to happen unless I didn’t feel like walking for a couple of weeks. Gerald probably didn’t look like a tough guy, but you don’t exactly have to be The Rock to beat the shit out of a thirteen year old boy.
He was a religious type, so he would always say shit about not sparing the rod. This was probably what attracted my mother to him because she had a religious upbringing and she felt ashamed for the things she had done in her youth. Gerald brought her back to the cross and more importantly to her family and any kind of inheritance there might be waiting for her.
I don’t know if it was the religion, the money, or the idea of normalcy that helped her turn a blind eye to Gerald’s activity. He was a gym coach, and occasionally he’d help out with the football teams so it was probably a huge disappointment to him that the kid everyone thought of as his son was just not fit for athletic competition. I was the exact opposite, but Gerald really thought he would be able to whip me into shape. The emphasis is on the whip.
I wore glasses. Hell, I wasn’t even the same color as him so there was never any doubt that I wasn’t the actual son of this doughy, pasty behemoth. I was short, and dark. Everyone knew I wasn’t his, but they all said he treated me like I was his own. If that were the case, I’m happy to tell you that he could never have children of his own.
He had a lot of ideas about what a woman was supposed to be, which he would eloquently espouse between many slaps and broken dishes. Tons of ideas about what a man was supposed to be as well. For me, he made sure to clench his hand into a fist so they weren’t slaps. The worst was always when he brought out the belt. It wasn’t just licks to the behind like the old-timers would always suggest, but full-on leather against my back and head.
He always said he was going to whip me into shape, but usually I just felt like a pool of nothingness. An entity fully aware of what they were and wishing to be anything but that.I was just a mass of cellular glob waiting to be shaped, but I was pretty damn sure it wasn’t going to be by the hand of this prick sitting in his recliner mesmerized by a bunch of other assholes on Fox News.
He proclaimed to love God, but if you ever heard him talk, you’d think O’Reilly and Rush were there at the last supper.They were his saints. He’d gobble that shit up, and it would just get him riled to no end. Riled up to come down on me or my mother. Now that I think about it, I think he loved how mad they would make him, like it was the anger that got him aroused. In a way, I guess he did love us, because all he ever showed us was that righteous anger and that was love to him. That was the love of God.
The night it started I was watching Monday Night Raw in my bedroom and Bret Hart was talking. I remember thinking that I wanted to be like that. The Hitman didn’t take shit from no one, and I would hang on every word he said. It was in the middle of that Bret Hart promo when I felt the leather against my face as Gerald exploded, “didn’t I tell you to take out that trash?”
I fell over and curled up immediately upon impact, but that didn’t stop him. He just kept wailing. My mother’s screams didn’t make him relent. He knew she wasn’t going to stop him. Her parents never approved of her until she settled down with Gerald. He was their kind of guy. Not like the guy that knocked her up. Gerald got her back in their good grace even with the age gap. “After all, would want her after having a kid like me at such a young age? She was damaged goods.”
The lashings continued, but he knew to go for the back. I blacked out the sound of the roaring crowd in the distance. My vision strobing in rhythm with the ceiling fan above as he came down on my belly and thighs. I tried to block but the leather didn’t feel that great against my forearms either so eventually, I just gave up and let him go to town. I knew he’d finish soon.
After I come to, I managed to get back on my feet within a couple of minutes. My mother asked me if I was okay. I told her that I was fine of course. She knew that wasn’t the case and would plan on keeping me home from school the next day to see how bad the bruising would get. “You going to get that trash now?” he bellowed from the kitchen where he sat at the table underneath the glow of a white fluorescent.
I lumbered out the door, lugging the garbage at my side. Threw it in the bin and then proceeded to drag the bin down to the curb. It was cold and quiet, no life anywhere, but I couldn’t help but feel like something was breathing on my neck. I heard the sound of pages rustling behind me. There was no breeze. There opened, presenting itself like a registry in the middle of my suburban driveway was a book.
I figured it must have been the blow to the head until I kneeled down and felt the rough brown paper with my fingers. They were real fingers, so it must be real paper. A real book. How it got there will forever be a mystery to me. There was no one around who could have placed it there in the time I walked the bin to the curb and turned around to find the book there. Materialized out of nowhere it seemed.
I scooped up the book and placed it under my coat. Hurriedly, I rushed to my room. Monday Night Raw was ending so I turned the tv off. Silk Stockings would be coming on and I didn’t want my parents to see it because they would think I was watching porn or something because it always opened with a woman in her underwear either killing someone or being killed. Always a woman in her underwear though. I hid the book underneath my bed. I don’t know why, but it felt like something I needed to keep hidden as well. I turned off the lights, kicked off my shoes, and put my coat on the chair at my desk. As long as there was no light coming from my room, no one would come in to check on me.
I laid there for over an hour watching the light in the hallway peeking under my door. As long as that light was there, someone was up. When it went out, it was because Gerald flipped the switch and that meant the coast was clear. As I laid there, I noticed the mattress swelling below me and then sinking back down in slow respiratory repetitions. The book underneath was throbbing with heaving breaths.
I hopped out of bed, grabbed the book and took it to my desk. Flipping on my tiny desk lamp praying it wouldn’t emit enough light for anyone to notice, The book was black with the title, strange foreign characters, printed in a deep scarlet red. Then, it happened. Those strange characters, a language that didn’t look like familiar in any way began to twist and contort before my very eyes into english: The Grimmr Evangelium.
As I flipped through the pages, the characters continued to transform before me, but as I was so young, I must admit that a lot of it was over my head, especially the pages about history. I went to a Christian school so my knowledge of history was somewhat limited, but the history it contained seemed to be hidden as I would never hear of any such things as Cykotomas, PTOSC, or Awais anywhere else.
Inside that book, it went on a great length about beings called Gyles from a place called the Pleroma which from what I could gather were like gods or maybe angels and demons. There were so many pages on different Gyles along with instructions on how someone could summon them. One, in particular, called out to me and its name was Velane, that who savors retribution.
I read the instructions over and over before creeping out of my room to retrieve the knife from the butcher’s block in the kitchen along with a candle and grill lighter from the pantry. Slowly and carefully, I returned to my room attempting to make as little noise as possible. I must have succeeded because if I had managed to wake Gerald, I would have found out fast. Once, back in my room, I lit the candle and placed it on the floor inside of a Coke bottle I fished out of the little trash can in my bedroom. I opened the book to the pages on Velane and laid it before me kneeling on two knees with that blade clasped between my sweating hands. Quietly, I said the words needed to wake Velane:
“Oh Velane, that who savors retribution. With this blade, let me open this vessel so that you may flow within me and deliver justice to my transgressors. Velane, make me your bride and your groom for with this blade, I devote myself to you as you return devotion with savory vengeance.”
After saying those words, I shoved the point of the blade inside my abdomen as instructed and did not stop shoving the blood inside until it had completely disappeared keeling over forward on my knees. While the pain was indescribable, it couldn’t have been any worse than the quiet and inscrutable pain I endured day in and day out every single day. I remember seeing the candle flame go out right before my eyes closed.
There at the end of my suburban street was a large wooded area where few people liked to go. Some of the neighborhood kids would go there to fool around or get high, but even they tried to find other places as there was just something off about that place.
I stood there at the end of this dead end. A red light glowing from behind the thick brush. That red stop light glow was no electronic emission. Velane called to me and there was nothing that would stop me from answering. I moved forward pushing the branches out of my way. As I grew closer to the source of the light, I couldn’t even be bothered by them or their thorns. My heart pounded with anticipation as I neared the clearing where the light pulsated.
There it was, a large pistillian opening in the middle of the woods, a pillar of red light beaming from its opening, an unfathomable deepness that can’t be measured. My mouth agape in awe, I approached it with joyous anticipation. I reached the apex of the hole where the ground began to decline into the opening from which the light poured. I descended down that small slope and into the red light.
Once inside, I felt myself sink into the bright, wet light. Though surrounded in a viscous fluid, I could breath. Not only could I breath. I could truly breath. The fluid filled my lungs, but there was nothing to panic about. For once, I wasn’t quietly panicking. I just sank. The warmness consumed me as I sank deeper and deeper. My body disintegrating into the red. Eventually, there was no separation, no body. I merely was that bright red fluid.
When I awoke, it was morning and I was laying in my bed as if nothing happened. Then, I pulled my shirt up and there was the slit in my abdomen. I touched it and fiddled with it amazed at how it opened with the touch of my fingers. The knife firmly stabbed into a place within me that contained no physical space. I could insert my entire hand within there and it seemed to lose all its handness which would then reassert itself when I withdrew it from the wound’s entry.
As I assumed, my mother kept me home from school that day. I always enjoyed those days as the kids at school were only slightly kinder than Gerald. You know, good Christian kids. They’d hit me, slap me, and call me every name you could muster. Since they were all white suburbanites, it didn’t phase them to call me racial slurs because there wasn’t anyone there that was going to call them on it. I certainly didn’t have any power to do so. So, strangely enough, the intense beatings from Gerald would often lead to some sort of reprieve from the beatings and harassment at Glory Hill.
I asked my mother if I could just lay in bed all day and she agreed as long as I got up to do some chores around two o’clock. That way it wouldn’t look like she was easy on me when Gerald got home. He couldn’t stand it when she was easy on me.
As I laid in bed watching boring daytime television, I could hear Velane whispering to me. What they whispered was faint, like a distant howling wind. The words were distorted by little breathy crackles, but they still comforted me. I didn’t have anything to fear anymore. Velane was with me now. Not even Gerald. I didn’t fear Gerald. I almost pitied him.
Gerald arrived home to a completely dark house. I had used the handcuffs I knew he kept in his drawer to cuff my mother to the railing of the bed. I taped her mouth to quiet her. Although I often hated her for turning her back on me, I knew she was just as imprisoned by him as I was. I never had any intention of hurting her. If Velane chose to, however, I most likely would not attempt to stop it.
She attempted to scream for Gerald through the duct tape covering her mouth, but he couldn’t hear her. He never was much of a listener. I stood behind him in the archway between the kitchen and the living room. “Do you like flowers, Gerald? Have you ever dreamed of being flowers?”
“What’d you say? You finally go psycho? Where’s your mother? What did you do with her?” he asked with that indignant tone. I knew what he was thinking. He thought I was being ungrateful and that he was going to teach me a lesson.
“She handcuffed to the bed in your room, but don’t worry, she’s fine. Now, about those flowers?”
“I don’t know what you’re thinking, boy, but I’m going to shut you up.”
I merely began to hum “Kiss from a Rose,” as I walked towards the backdoor. For whatever reason, Gerald didn’t just try to attack me then and there. Something got him, but he was going to be persistent in his attempt to beat me down. It wouldn’t be any fun like this. He’d need me to grovel for forgiveness before he beat the shit out of me so he would merely hurl insults and threats until I got scared. But, I wouldn’t get scared. I would just hum “Kiss from a Rose” as I walked towards the end of the dead end street.
He’d scream and call me names, tell me what he was going to do to me, and say he was going to send me here or there. I just strolled, and he followed frothing mad. There was the dark forest. No red light, but I just made my way through the brush gleefully humming. Gerald followed. I knew he would. Maybe, he thought he’d just leave me here in a puddle of blood and the dogs could come get me. No one would care if they found me or not.
Once there in the clearing, I walked towards Velane and the ground opened up. I turned around and spread my arms with a huge smile, welcoming Gerald. He emerged from the brush with a cut on his cheek from a branch seething with rage. He ran towards me and just as he grabbed me by the throat, the pillar of red light burst from its opening. He released me as he looked up at the pillar of light exploding into the heavens above. I leaned forward and kissed him then pulled him down into the red below. There in the red, we floated apart and he sank with his eyes wide open in astonishment and terror. I smiled as I just watched him sink further and further.
The next day, I awoke in my bed as I had before, but there was no Gerald. My mother hollered for me as she had never done before. I suppose she remembered me cuffing her and taping her mouth shut, but she would never speak of it. She was a free woman now, and although they went looking for Gerald, they would never find him. I was suspected of murder for a while, but with no evidence, all they had to go on were the couple of witnesses that said they saw a raving lunatic chase me into the woods. As for Velane, it continued to whisper, but those whispers over time became less and less distorted. “I still hunger.”