Well, now that I've sent The Constant Tower off (in it's very messy state) to my editor, I can now return to Dark Inheritance. So, FYE: here is the fourth chapter of Dark Inheritance. Hope you enjoy. Am gonna try to finish this for nanowrimo. -C#As a child Ethan had feared her. He would lay in his bedroom, his head covered under the Mickey Mouse blankets, hoping she would not come. But she always did. At least two nights a week, the headless female torso would materialize in his room. His bedroom door would clamp itself shut under his shaking hands. His hands would go clammy and inside his Spiderman slippers, his little hammer-toed feet would grow cold. He would shout and plead and beg the looming specter to not hurt him, to just leave, leave, please, please! She would call to him, laughing. And that was damn strange because she had no mouth, at least no physical one his little kid eyes could see. When she spoke, her voice grated, like fingernails against a blackboard, and it sounded muffled as if it came from behind some thick invisible wall. Which he figured was understandable because, after all, she had no mouth.He tried to explain all this to his mother, tried to explain how the smell of death would fill the room, and the room would go cold. He followed his mother around when bedtime came, telling her repeatedly that a naked female spirit without a head lived in the walls and came to visit him at nights and could his mother please sleep in his room with him, or maybe could he sleep with her in hers, especially since now his daddy had run off. He told his mother, “when she comes into the room, the room smells like dead people.”His mother stroked his bowl-cut hair and responded, “Son, how do you know how dead people smell?”He answered, “I just know.”One day, his mother asked if he wanted to switch rooms with his sister, Ruth. Such a question only showed she didn’t believe him. He thought of Ruthie alone in that room and what the spirit would do to her. He decided he didn’t want Ruthie to be hurt. “I’ll stay in my room,” he said. He said this although he was sure the spirit would kill him but he was prepared to fight her. He fought her a long while. Needless to say, he figured it best to not even mention that the spirit tried to force sex on him.At one point he told his Uncle Li all about it. His uncle said it was a demon, that such things were common. His uncle tried to persuade his mother to take him to a Shinto priests. But his Uncle Li was a drunk and his parents were good modern Chinese Christians – Methodists. They told his uncle to stop filling Ethan’s head with superstitious old stories. A week after that, his uncle died suddenly. He had left a note among his sparse belongings telling the family the spirit was going to kill him.Ethan got to reading the Bible and visiting the local shrines whenever the family went to Chinatown. He took to buying praying candles at the supermarket and burning them on rocks in the woods near their upstate New York home. His mother noticed his new-found spirituality. She said it was good if he studied the spirituality of other cultures but he shouldn’t go overboard. His older brother, Arnold, said he was just a silly kid turning to religion because his dad had deserted the family for his sleazy co-worker. Ethan listened to them, tried to mull over their words and sort through what was happening in his room at nights. He read about generational curses. He read about haunted houses. He read about psychosis, mental illness, and depression. But nothing helped and after a while it just seemed to him that neither Buddha nor the Christian God were strong enough to help him. He began to believe the entire thing was his karma. Yet, he kept wondering why such a bad thing, such a weird thing, should happen to him.During all that time the Beloved kept attempting to seduce him. She would tell him to lift the covers, to not be afraid of him, that she was there to protect him and love him. The silky smoothness of her ice-cold breasts, the rawness of the moist place between her legs (even though she smelled like garbage and a dead dog he once found in the woods)— they seduced. After a while, he gave in to her. What joy she brought him! What shame too! Terrified at first at the sudden venture into sexuality, he grew to like the wild force of her sex, grew to love her. But she was headless, mouthless, lifeless.He was no more than eight years when the visitation began and about ten when he began to give in to her. That was the day when he realized that goodness was all a crock. Or at least the power of goodness. Heck, his dad wouldn’t have dumped his mom if the world so was good and if God had any control. But still, he did feel that he was a bit abnormal. He knew that love between a spirit and a human could never be permanent. One day, he told the Beloved so.She answered him, “One day, you will touch my human flesh, hear my human voice, and enjoy my human body.”“How will I know you?” he asked. After all, the Beloved had no head.“You will find me,” she answered. “Seek me. Love many women. Seek and you will find me.”And that’s what he did. He had dated. Many women, of all colors. But none of them made his body thrill as much as the Beloved did. There was always something lacking. He told this to the Beloved when she visited him. “I searched,” he pleaded, “and none of these women give me the pleasure that you do. Their bodies aren’t as cold as yours. They don’t look like you. They don’t smell like death.”“You will have to search for me in other places,” she said. “Climb windows, enter locked houses. Find me. I will live in one of those women. Find me, and pleasure me.”And that’s what he began doing. He was eighteen when he raped the first girl. But even then, the pleasure was nothing compared to what the Beloved gave him. He didn’t like to see the girl lying there under him, crying. The Beloved told him that guilt prevented him from enjoying himself, that he should cast guilt aside. The Beloved had spoken the truth. After the fifth rape, he began to allow pleasure to flow into his body. The pleasure helped to push the guilt away. When he pushed himself into the women, he felt the Beloved’s joy working inside him. Now, sitting on his bed in Attica, he no longer felt or even understood the terror that used to make his little boy body tremble.The Beloved had also been faithful. She always protected him. Even when he murdered them two girls. The Beloved had told him to, and he understood the expedience of it. There was little about the Beloved’s commands that he never understood. She was always right. Hadn’t she told him to decapitate several of the women he had raped? To make them in her image? Hadn’t he done that? And those women’s bodies had never been found. If only he had listened and had avoided the woman in the mall, the woman who turned out to be the mother of his Beloved son. If he had done as the Beloved had ordered, he would not have ended up in jail.He lay in his cell remembering his trial and thinking. How strange it had been to hear the court officers, the prosecutors, and the cops call him a rapist! What kind of rapist would kneel between the legs of a woman to pleasure her? They had not understood that. Detective Ramsey had even called him a sick puppy. Stupid woman! When he got released, he wouldn’t immediately kill her though. That was just the kind of thing the cops would expect of him. He’d bide his time. Besides there were more important things to do. He still had to find his son. The Beloved wanted that. And he had to find the Beloved also. The Beloved with a head, a mouth, human flesh. He would search for her as long as it took....and he would find her.
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