would rush him with the knife. He was fairly confident that he could gut him like a fish before he could pull that gun from its holster. But Dale had never taken on a grown man before unless he was ambushing him in his sleep. Men intimidated Dale and a guy as big as this detective would probably put up a good fight. He might even wrestle the knife away from Dale and use it on him.
Dale swallowed hard and his legs began to tremble. Perspiration soaked his T-shirt and ran down his forehead into his eyes. He wiped away the sweat with the back of his hand and crept closer. Now he was so close he could have been on top of the detective in three quick steps if he needed to. He was sizing up the big man, trying to decide where to plunge the knife in first if he had to defend himself or where to cut him when he reached him to silence him and take him out before he could fight or make a sound that might wake up the rest of the house. The last thing Dale wanted was a fight.
Two more steps and the detective’s eyes opened. Dale almost screamed. He plunged the knife into the side of the detective’s neck so hard the blade completely submerged in his flesh up to the hilt. Blood sprayed from the wound and the detective’s eyes bulged. Both of his hands flew up to the knife in his throat and a gurgling and wheezing sound came from his mouth. He started to rise up from the couch, groping for his weapon with one hand while holding his throat with the other. Dale clubbed him with the hammer and the detective fell back onto the couch. Dale hit him again and one of the detective’s eyes spilled out of the socket and drooled down his cheek like an oyster shucked from its shell. The next blow caved in the left side of his head and the next one dislodged a piece of his skull, flinging it across the room and revealing a patch of the detective’s gray matter.
The detective’s remaining eye had rolled up into his skull and his body began to convulse. Dale placed a pillow under the detective’s feet so his spasmodic fit wouldn’t make too much noise and wake Sarah or her husband. The big man was still making that wet, asthmatic wheezing sound. Dale grabbed the knife protruding from the detective’s throat and began to saw through his windpipe, cutting his esophagus in half and nearly decapitating him. The corpse finally ceased its Saint Vitus’s dance and lay still. Dale put his foot on the man’s chest for leverage and then yanked the knife out of his throat. He wiped the blade off in the detective’s graying hair and turned toward the stairs.
This was the tricky part. There were two stair treads that squeaked and Dale could never remember which ones they were. He tried to walk on the edge of each stair instead of stepping in the middle to eliminate the potential for a squeak that would alert Sarah and her husband. If he had to flee the house, he wouldn’t be able to bring the detective back to life. That would be murder and Dale knew that murderers went to hell. Worse was the fear that if he murdered someone and defied God’s law, then God might take away his gift. He had to make sure that didn’t happen.
Dale took another step and felt the stair flex under his weight. He slowly released his weight off his foot and used the railings to lift himself up over the stair, supporting himself on his arms. He took the next few steps without a sound and was soon standing in the upstairs hallway outside the master bedroom.
Dale knew that there was a strong possibility that Sarah and her husband were on the other side of the door with their guns cocked, waiting for him to enter so they could empty their pistols into his face. His pulse had been over a 160 beats per minute since he’d woken under the sink. Now it felt like it was closer to 200. He put his hand on the doorknob and slowly turned the handle. The door crept open slowly and Dale slipped inside.
The room was dark except for the dim illumination from the streetlight outside leaking through the blinds. It was just enough light for Dale to see that the room was empty. The bedsheets had been pulled back revealing a mattress stained with blood. Dale could smell blood in the air, rancid blood. He stood in the doorway for a while trying to figure out where they could be. He spun around and looked in back of him to make sure they hadn’t set some sort of trap and weren’t sneaking up on him from behind. Then he checked the closet and under the bed. They weren’t there. Dale was about to scream when he remembered the other two bedrooms. They had probably slept in one of those.
The longer Dale stood in the bedroom, the more overwhelming the smell of fetid blood became. Slowly it dawned on him that the smell was probably the reason why they had not slept in their own bed. He turned around and crept quietly out of the room, closing the bedroom door behind him.
In his socks, still tiptoeing as softly as possible, Dale made his way to the first bedroom and pushed open the door. His heart lightened and an overwhelming feeling of joy rose inside him as he spotted Sarah lying beside her husband, eyes closed, sleeping soundly. Her big husband was making whining and whimpering sounds in his sleep and tossing and turning fitfully. Seeing that videotape of what Dale had done to him had obviously disturbed him greatly.
Dale didn’t know what had possessed him that day. He had just wanted to punish the big man. He wanted to emasculate him, humiliate him. Seeing Josh’s big cock and knowing that he was fucking Sarah with it every night, that she willingly gave herself to him, that she enjoyed it, loved it, loved him, imagining her sucking it, letting him fuck her in the ass with it, had enraged him. All he could think of was how much he wanted to break Josh down and show him, show her, that Josh was not a better man than Dale just because his penis was twice as big. He wanted Sarah to see her big, strong husband with his porn-star cock, humbled. He wanted to show her who the real man was. Thinking about it had made Dale’s cock hard and so he had gone with it and used it as an instrument of torture. It had even surprised Dale when he had managed to ejaculate. He wondered if they had done a rape kit on Josh. He wondered how humiliated the big man must have felt when they swabbed his rectum and found Dale’s semen inside of him.
Dale took a moment to delight in the big man’s misery, watching as the big man moaned and grimaced in his sleep, reliving his violation; then Dale stepped inside the room and lifted the hammer over his head. He brought it down with all of his might and blinked when the blood spattered his face. Sarah began to scream almost immediately. She always screamed. Dale had come to love that sound as much as he loved her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Sarah woke up when she heard the detective moving around downstairs. She could hear Josh’s voice down there too. The two men were talking about something with obvious excitement. Sarah sat up in bed, yawning and stretching, and tried to hear what they were talking about.
Something had happened. Last night. Even with the detective standing guard. Somehow, Dale had gotten into the house again. Sarah swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. She felt her feet squish into the carpet and pink foam squeeze up from the carpet padding in between her toes. She ran to the window and opened the blinds. There was a clean spot on the carpet so light that it was almost white. The spot was huge. It surrounded the entire bed. Where she had stepped, pink footsteps trailed all the way to the window. Where Josh had stepped, the footsteps were almost red. Even the sheets on the bed were no longer the white ones that had been on the bed almost since they’d moved into this house. They were a pale blue set she’d had since college and hadn’t seen in several years. Sarah began to tremble. This was too much. This was all just way too much.
The room began to tilt and spin and Sarah knew she was about to faint. She began to hyperventilate and her heart felt like it was going to pound its way through her rib cage. She wanted to scream but could not find the voice. Sarah tried to focus, to slow her breathing, slow her heartbeat, do something to fend off the panic attack before it took complete control over her. Now that she knew that this was all real, that it was not some figment of her imagination, it was just too much to deal with.
Sarah took several steps toward the door. When she felt the bloody water squish out of the carpet between her toes again, she could not help herself. Sarah screamed and collapsed onto the floor.
Detective Lassiter, Harry, and her husband were all hovering over, looking down at her with worried expressions on their faces when she woke. She was downstairs in the living room, lying on the couch with a pillow beneath her head.
“Are you okay?” Josh asked. He looked so worried and frightened.
“What happened?”
“He got in again. We’ve got him on tape walking into our bedroom. But he’s disappeared. The police can’t find him anywhere.”
Sarah looked up and there was a huge reddish brown stain on the ceiling above their heads. She looked down at the floor where there was a similar stain on the concrete.
