Lying next to him, feeling his heart beating inside of his chest, the beat strong and rhythmic, not arrhythmic, irregular, weak, or, perhaps (no, Bonnie, not perhaps, certainly) best of all, not the pounding, alacritous pattern known as tachycardia, she could hardly believe that the events in Pittsburgh had actually occurred.
Ah, but you have the scar to prove it, don't you Bonnie? she thought. You know the one you instinctively run your finger alongside when you get anxious? Especially if that anxiety revolves around Bobby.
Bonnie pushed the thought aside, and held tighter to Bobby as she closed her eyes and willed her nervous system to begin what she thought of as the shutdown routine, which was how she visualized her bodies' preparations for sleep. A computer, shutting down for the night, only to (hopefully) reboot in the morning, refreshed and strong, ready to tackle the day's challenges. She clung tight to Bobby and, feeling the patterns of both his respiration and pulse (both strong and exuding a comforting vitality, even in their sleep slowed states) she slowly plunged downwards into one of Poe's little slices of death; a night's slumber. And, as they often did, the events from the time spent in Pittsburgh revisited her during the night.
There hadn't been any shouts of “The power of Christ compels you!” There had not been any pea soup vomit; nor had there been any three hundred and sixty degree head revolutions or any walking down stairs in a wholly terrifying upside down crab like shuffle. No “your mother sucks cock!” No masturbation with a crucifix. The events was no less serious; it was much more so, in fact, as the events in Pittsburgh had not been contained to the fantastical realm of the film woven through a movie reel. They may have been less, well, theatrical, but they were much more disconcerting. Much more terrifying.
What preceded the events of that night was a slow but steady change in personality. Bobby's usual cheery demeanour had, in March of 1994, begun to show signs of intermittent slippage, almost like wear and tear on spark plugs resulting in the occasional misfire or hindered turnover. By September, these misfirings had almost become as probable as a normally Bobby day. In December, the mental abuse had begun.
It had started with an incorrect bill payment. More to the point, Bonnie had accidentally overpayed on the previous months' gas bill, and Bobby had lashed out in a vitriolic stream of shouted curses and insults. Really nasty, horrible things, unwarranted, certainly, but more than that; the were completely and utterly without precedent. Even with his puzzling slow but steady decline in affect, he had never, ever been downright malicious, and in the time Bonnie had come to think of as Before, he would never had come even remotely close to admonishing her with any real expressed anger over something so trivial, let alone actually verbally assaulting her, but on December 4th, of 1994, sitting at the kitchen table, going over the financial records for the previous month and stumbling upon an overpaid gas bill dated November 17th, Bobby had marked a milestone in his After period by verbally abusing his wife Bonnie.
There he was, in vivid detail, again at the kitchen table. His black hair damp against his forehead as he literally poured over the bills, paying excruciatingly close attention to all manner of fine detail; detail so fine it was not exaggeration to refer to it simply as minutia; the sort of stuff the Before Bobby would have skipped over with a wave of his hand, if any outward expression at all. Not this new Bobby, however. And certainly not this month, which seemed to be the worst thus far in a linear progression of a steadily worsening demeanour, slightly noticeable on a day to day basis, very noticeable if you backed up and took a month by month perspective on things. From that angle, you could almost see the trend angling upwards, plotted on a graph in black magic marker, with months listed along the X axis, and 'negativity intrusions upon the affect' on the Y axis. One could even imagine the title of the imaginary plotted figure, if one were so inclined: 'Inverse Relationship Between Positive Affect and the Passage of Time in Unceremoniously and Inexplicably Changed Males.' A word other than 'changed' occurred to Bonnie
(possessed)
but she did not pay it any heed. Even in sleep, the word was one that haunted her, and she would try her damnedest to avoid consciously thinking of it.
Bonnie had been sitting across from him, watching as he spent several minutes per bill, agonizing over every detail, his brow soaked with sweat and his jet black hair, hair that Bonnie had, innumerable times over the course of their eight year marriage, run her fingers through, both in the throes of passion and outside of that aspect of the marital relationship, dampened with sweat, stuck to hi anyways). He tossed the bill he was currently examining aside and brought the next one to the front of the pile. He began to move his lips as he read the contents of the bill, and Bonnie had time to note two things before the events of the day, acting, unbeknownst to her at the time, as a harbinger of (much worse) things to come, took a turn for the worse.
The first thing she noted was that for as long as she had known him, she had never witnessed him mouthing along with whatever it was that he was reading, and yet now he had been lightly reading aloud everything that he would normally have tackled silently, since the onset of whatever it was he was currently afflicted with. And this observation was the genesis for the second observation, which, while seemingly undeniable, was something that she wished she could both unsee and especially unhear: Bobby was reading aloud everything that he was reading while he was reading it........except he was reading aloud in a very ancient sounding language, a language that Bonnie was positive that he did not know........and he was reading in someone (or something) else's voice.
His voice sounded thick, dark, leathery, scratchy, and old. Very, very, very old. It was a voice that conveyed an immense age, an immeasurable amount of power, and, just under the surface, perhaps more perceptible to some than to others, a hint of malicious intent. A malignancy bubbling beneath the surface, like the cancerous cells of a tumour rapidly metastasizing just beneath the surface of the skin; a dangerous process thinly veiled by the faintest of covers.
The sound of that voice brought a chill to Bonnie's spine.
Transfixed, Bonnie sat and observed her husband pour over utility bills with a fine toothed comb, until he hit upon something that stopped him dead in his tracks, bringing an end to the sound of that voice, and when he next spoke, at a normal (well, slightly raised), volume, it was with his own voice, and it was in English. Not a trace of any foreign languages or strange voices were to be heard.
Had she imagined it?
Did I really hear that, she had wondered, or was I imagining it? She knew that her husband's sporadic, often incomprehensible (compared to his norm) behaviour as of late could easily have inspired such an, such a (what? Hallucination? Vision? Aural imagining?), well, such an event . Well, either way, it was a non issue at the moment, because he husband's voice was back to normal, except for one little detail.
He was shouting and cussing at her, hurling nasty insults like little invisible javelins; javelins that cut through the fabric of relationships that is woven between two individuals. Throw enough of them and that fabric is ripped apart, severing the ties that bind.
Pulled away from her thoughts, and brought back to the reality of the moment, his voice suddenly swelled and filled her realm of comprehension like sound returning to the world when resurfacing after an underwater dive. Momentary confusion cannibalized by sudden clarity and a return to normal comprehension. Only this time, there was nothing normal to comprehend. Never in his Before period had Bobby acted in such a way.
A nasty array of words, concocted and issued side by side and simultaneously, all with a singular goal: to hurt. To admonish, to chastise, to rebuke. All because of a simple error: the accidental overpayment of a gas bill (which of course could easily be rectified, with the aid of a simple phone call and perhaps ten to fifteen minutes to reach the proper channels and enter the appropriate information).
The insults and curses kept coming, but now they were fading, fading away, as the dream shifted (as dreams so often do) forward in time, from December of 1994 to February of 1995, which was about a month shy of the one year anniversary of the beginning of the period Bonnie had come to know as Bobby's After period.
The February-March 1995 period of their Pittsburgh ordeal played out rather quickly in reality, but in the Wild West that was time constraint in the world of dreams, the ordeal played out in the theatre of Bonnie's mind in mere seconds. As her eyes danced the dance of dreams in their sockets, her dreaming mind replayed the least few significant and terrifying events of the period of their lives known to her as either The Pittsburgh Ordeal, or Bobby's After period.
Dinner table, sometime in February. Bonnie watching in perplexed horror as Bobby slowly cut a gash into his left wrist using the steak knife which he grasped in his right hand. He started at the palm of his hand, and worked his way up, only stopping after cutting a gash six or seven inches long, at which time he affixed his horrified wife with a gaze that screamed insanity; eyes bug eyed and bloodshot, black hair standing on end, right hand holding onto the knife still digging into the flesh of his left wrist. After staring at the horrified Bonnie for several seconds, seconds which had seemed to her in the moment to be successive eternities, he spoke, and for the first time since December that other voice had returned, but this time it managed to speak a broken sort of English, although said English was couched in random segments of what appeared to be nothing but gibberish.
“Entah, untah, down the street, ugang, lugang, not across the road, barkah, sparkah, bitch slut hoe, twinkle toe, happah, dappah, that will be $3.99 bitch, you pay, I play, a love lost.” Bobby chanted this strange lullaby of insanity before bursting out into a strangled sounding, screeching sort of laughter.
Even in the dream, Bonnie felt the ice cold fear grip her chest and run its marble fingers down her spine, in that practised way it had, having of course done it for time immemorial. She sat there, a prisoner in the iron grip of fear, completely at a loss as to what, if any, her next course of action should be.
The dream, however, decided for her. Flash ahead to later that month.
The bedroom, night. Bobby and Bonnie were engaged in lovemaking, their bodies draped together, limbs entwined, joined at member and mouth, Bonnie grateful for the break in Bobby's condition. They were far more sporadic now, but they still (fortunately) occurred. Like a break in stormy weather, when the rain would stop and the sun would break through the clouds, casting its exalting glow over the gloomy, rain soaked day, Bobby, the real Bobby, would break through for a while, and Bonnie, often dizzy with gratitude, would come at him with a barrage of questions and ideas, which all boiled down to you need help and we can do this together, both of which would be met with a very mild rebuke, the prevailing sentiment being I'm fine, it's just a bit of stress, it'll pass.
Of course, Bonnie was never satisfied, and she also knew better; however, she would also be so thrilled (and relieved) to have her Bobby back for the time being that she would drop the matter in favour of conversation, lovemaking, a meal, whatever. Just average, everyday, boring old married couple things that, when they occurred so few and far between, felt more like a honeymoon than they did boring old marital activities. Even something as mundane as cleaning the house together would feel exquisite. Yet, Bobby never seemed to share in her joy, at least not to the same extent she felt it. It was as though he was unaware of the true extent of his condition and therefore was always slightly bemused when he would be met with an absolutely ecstatic wife upon the discovery that he was in one of what she came to think of as his refractory periods, a designation whose subtext was not lost on her.
And so they were enjoying eachother on an intimate level during one of Bobby's refractory periods when something unprecedented occurred. Up until that point, Bobby's slippage in and out of his condition was preceded by, and took place during, sleep. However, this time he had transitioned during wakefulness, and it happened so suddenly that Bonnie was at first unaware. One moment she was underneath her husband, who was slowly making love to her, rhythmically synching his movements with hers, and the next she was underneath a madman whose thrusts were crazed and desperate. Animalistic and crude, she was being taken as opposed to being enjoyed, and when she looked up into her husband's face, an inquisitive look still forming upon her own, what she saw would haunt her for the rest of her natural life.
In place of her husband's face was a grinning, gleaming human skull, with a ring of fire for hair, and a crimson mask, likely blood, upon its cheeks. When she glanced up at the dead thing ravaging her from the inside, just as she screamed, it cackled and dropped her a stomach churning wink, as if to say “Is it as good for you as it is for me, baby?”
CONCLUSION
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