CHAPTER FOUR
Dale sat in his room reading an old article in his dogeared
The girls at his high school paid no attention to him except when they teased him and called him a loser or nerd. A bad case of acne made Dale’s face look like he were growing cranberries on it. Where his skin was not erupting with pimples it was sickly pale, and he was so skinny that the bones in his chest and shoulders stood out prominently through his skin whenever he dared to wear a tank top. It looked as if he hadn’t eaten in months. His chest was concave and his cheeks were sunken in. His eyes stared out from deep in their sockets, giving his face a cadaverous skeletal look. He was the very antithesis of the athletes all the girls in his high school were chasing. He didn’t have their tanned muscular physiques. He looked about as healthy as death smoking a cigar in a nuclear waste dump.
Dale turned next to a story about Ed Kemper but soon lost interest in it. He wasn’t interested in reading about killers who murdered just for the sheer joy of killing. He knew that joy. That was the only joy he could ever remember knowing. Now that he was in the full swing of puberty and his hormones had begun to rage and riot, he was interested in other forms of satisfaction. He was more and more interested in the girls in his class and curious about what pleasures their young bodies might hold.
Dale could understand raping a woman and then murdering her to keep her silent. It had a sort of logic to it. He could even understand the idea of killing just for the pleasure of the act. But the idea of taking souvenirs home, pieces of their corpses, and masturbating with them, that made no sense at all. The only reason he could think of to rape a woman would be so you didn’t have to masturbate. Raping a woman and then killing her was one thing, but killing her and then raping her was just twisted. Dale thought about his father and what he’d seen him doing to his mother’s corpse. He had been getting just as much pleasure from skinning her as he had from fucking her.
Dale slammed the book shut when he felt an erection swelling in his shorts. He remembered how his father had stabbed his mother again and again and then slit her throat as he fucked her doggy-style. Dale was ashamed at how that memory made him feel. He knew it was wrong but he couldn’t help the sensations that image aroused in his body. It was as if his own body was betraying him and his mother. Dale was terrified that he understood Kemper more than he’d realized. He thought about what his grandmother had said about God being crazy for giving the power of life to a person like him. He hated to admit it, but the old woman had been right. He wouldn’t do anything good with this power.
In the next room, Dale’s mother was taking a bath. Dale had heard her running the bathwater hours ago. She hadn’t left the bathroom since. He wondered if he ought to check on her. She had been in the bath far too long and he had heard a splashing and thumping sound coming from in there twenty or thirty minutes ago. He was afraid she might have fallen and hurt herself. It didn’t matter though. If she was dead, he would simply bring her back like he’d done before.
The hollow echo of solitary drops of water splashing down into a larger pool of water echoed down the hallway as Dale approached the bathroom he shared with his mother. He grasped the handle but the door was locked. It was one of those privacy locks that were about as useless as childproof caps on medicine bottles. Dale reached for the little metal pin that his mother kept above the doorway. All you had to do was slip it, or just about anything else that would fit into the little hole, in the center of the doorknob and the lock would disengage. It was more of a nuisance than a deterrent if someone really wanted to get in. The “key” wasn’t there.
“Mom?”
There was no answer.
“Mom?” Dale spoke in a louder voice. “Are you all right in there?”
Still no answer.
Dale banged his fist on the door.
“Mom! Mom!”
All he could hear was the drip of the tub faucet.
Dale sighed and turned away from the door. He took his time walking back to his room to get a hanger. There was no hurry. He had learned through trial and error that even if someone had been dead for several hours he could still bring them back, as long as they hadn’t begun to decompose. Once a corpse began to rot it was good and dead.
Once he had retrieved a wire hanger from his closet, Dale began straightening it as he walked back down the hall. He imagined he would find his mother drowned in the bathtub after slipping and hitting her head on the edge of the tub. Perhaps she had fallen out of the tub completely and cracked her neck. Whatever it was, he could fix it.
Dale slid the straightened hanger into the hole in the doorknob and disengaged the lock. The door popped open and Dale slipped inside. He wasn’t prepared for what he found. Dale’s mother lay in the tub just as he had expected, only she hadn’t slipped and hit her head or broken her neck or drowned or had a stroke or a heart attack. She had slit her wrists. The bathwater was tinted red like fruit juice. She had made a mess of her wrists. She cut across them first; then she’d taken the blade and cut all the way up her forearms. Ghastly red crosses scarred her arms.
Her eyes were closed and she looked as if she’d simply fallen asleep. Her breasts were pale and flabby and had flopped to either side of her chest. Her legs were splayed immodestly but the amount of blood in the tub prevented Dale from seeing anything. Dale felt that uncomfortable stirring in his shorts again as he stared at his mother’s nude dead form. This time he didn’t shy away from it. There was no one around. No one to see what he was doing. Why not have some fun? he thought. He had never seen a real woman naked before, and even though it was his own mother, she
He reached out and hefted her big flabby breasts in his hands, then rubbed the nipples. The straining in his pants became more persistent. Dale knelt down and licked droplets of blood and bathwater from her nipples, then began to suck them. He pinched them hard, bit one, then brought his lips to his mother’s mouth and prepared to breathe life back into her lungs. He was just about to exhale when he spotted the words written on the shower wall behind her.
Dale paused there, trying to decide what to do.
It was her do-not-resuscitate order.
The idea of being alone terrified him. Maybe it was just a test? Maybe she knew he would bring her back and she was just testing him? Maybe she was warning him to be a good boy or she’d leave him forever.
“Noooo!”
He clamped his mouth onto hers and breathed into her lungs again and again until she began to breathe for herself. She let out a deep breath and then a sob. A wail of anguish came from her as she rose from the bathtub. Her eyes were wild and she pulled at her hair and scratched her face.
“Why? Why? Why, Dale? Why did you do this? Why didn’t you let me die? Why did you bring me back? Why didn’t you let me die?”
Dale looked confused.
“B-because I need you. I love you.”
Dale’s mother shook her head.
“No. No, you don’t love me. You don’t know what love is. You’re not capable of feeling love. I don’t know what you feel, or if you feel anything at all, but it isn’t love. You’re evil, Dale. You’re some kind of monster. Now just leave me alone and let me die.”
