Please Don't Go (50 page)

The squat toddler meandered toward his mother, poker in hand, staring dreamily into the glowing red prong as if it held the secrets of his universe. “Father?” he said with a dissatisfied whisper.

“
Yes?”

“
Step away from my mother. I don’t believe we’ll be needing her anymore. I’ve already got myself a fitting enough mother,” he stated in the heartless tone of a dictator. Zephyr looked down at his son with a puzzled look, as if to ask without the use of words,
who?
But he already knew the answer and to confirm that Charlie put his forefinger to his temple, tapping.
Right here
, he replied with his eyes and curled back lips.
Right here
.

Charlie swung the hot poker over the top of his head, crashing into Jackie’s forehead with a sizzling pop. Zephyr backed away from her in horror, falling to his knees and covering his face. He could smell her skin, charred by the heat of the poker. It cooled off soon after and Charlie repeated his bludgeoning act again and again, cracking her head until it stopped making noise. The skull had broken into so many bits that there was no more audible response to his barrage. The ugly noises froze Zephyr in terror. He wanted to reach out and grab his son’s arm, to restrain him, but he knew that the damage was done.

Lilith’s legion smiled and so did Charlie.

***

Zephyr stared at his repaired typewriter. All things need fixing eventually, especially when you are the man of the house. With a soldering gun he had found in the basement, Zephyr had rebuilt his smashed steel typewriter in the summer previous, but now found little use for it. That bridge had burned, and so he sighed in a sense of both disgust and relief.

This is another journal entry. Like all the ones that have come before it, but this one is special.

My last entry.

I have little more to say than that. In fact, I wonder if I ever really had anything to say about anything at all. Maybe I’m just a fucking teapot without water. Without heat. Without a goddamned care in the world.

There was a time that I cared about what happened to us. To Charlie. To myself. To Jackie.

Jackie. I think about her and I just want to die. I want Charlie to sneak into my room in the night, to choke me until my face is blue and I have not a breath in my chest. So that I can go see her again. What he did to her was unforgivable, but I lifted no hand to stop the little fucking beast. I know that it’s not Charlie, that Charlie in the human sense does not exist, that it’s Lilith inside of him, making him continue this nightmare for another generation. Sometimes, I cannot help to wish that he had died in childbirth.
I only push forward hoping that Charlie and I can have some peace one day, that we can live the life that may have been under a different set of circumstances. If only for a year. A month. A week. A day. Just one day as father and son, without the raging bitch between us, manipulating his every thought.

I can’t write anymore. I hear Charlie crying for my attention in the next room. He’ll be upon me any minute. They are growing more powerful, and at the same time... I only grow weaker. Age is a horrific bitch. I must hide these thoughts forevermore.

Goodbye.

13.

When Charlie went off to college, Zephyr kissed him on the cheek, but Charlie begrudgingly wiped away the smudge of that weak-hearted gesture, scowling at the rapist who had seeded his dead mother. “Stay away from me,” he snapped, displaying his teeth for Zephyr.

The lines in Zephyr’s face were deepened with every year that passed, especially since Jackie’s demise. He had never purported to believe that raising a boy on his own would be easy, regardless of what kind of thing inhabited his body. As the years progressed, Charlie did the driving himself. When called upon by necessity or to torture her former lover, Lilith would emerge from the deep recesses of him and slap Zephyr back into place, just long enough to remind him that there was still no escape, even after eighteen grueling years. Zephyr imagined that such a span of time was a blink in the eye of Lilith, that she could have handled that stint without a second thought.

She allowed them their happiness in meager doses, but kept close watch like a guard atop a tower. Having such an early influence on the mind and heart of Charlie had made all the difference. He was more like Lilith than he was like his father. And Jackie, well... Jackie was non-existent in the child.

“
You act smart when you get out there. Don’t let her boss you around too much. You need to enjoy college for whatever you can get out of it. I never got to finish, so I think it would be pretty fitting if you did. You’ll make me proud,” Zephyr said with his hand on Charlie’s shoulder, grinning at the pride that he could not hold at bay, though it revolted Charlie at his very core.

“
Go to Hell,” Charlie griped, tossing his long dark hair off to the side, a dot of tissue paper descending from his face. He had recently started to shave. Zephyr had shown him how to lather up, but Charlie preferred to shave dry. He liked the way the little beads of blood looked all over his face. It was thrilling to him in some sick way, and Zephyr left him to that minor joy.

“
Your mother would be so proud of you,” Zephyr sniveled.

“
I hope she’s burning in Hell. In fact, I
know
she’s burning in Hell.” Charlie replied, grinning.

Zephyr laughed out loud at his boy. Charlie’s sense of humor had sprung out of a quiet desperation that the boy muscled through. Being home-schooled had been the wisest parental decision he had ever made, but he regretted that Charlie had missed out on so many friendships, girlfriends, football games, keg parties... all the things that made youth so invigorating, things that Zephyr could barely remember in his fading past (though he had always lived his life off the beaten path). There were still things he could grapple with in his waning thoughts. Jackie, in particular. If Charlie could meet a woman that was half the diamond that Jackie had been, he would be in for a blessed life. “Your mother will always be in our hearts, Chuck.” Zephyr called him Chuck whenever they barbed at each other, which was typically one-sided.

“
Not in my heart. As for yours, I’ll rip it out of your chest if you try to visit me.”

Zephyr grinned. Charlie sneered, his face coated with disdain. “Well, you’re a man now, so I have to leave you to your own devices, just like my father did with me,” Zephyr noted, thinking for a moment of his own father, who had been found burned alive in the woods some months after Charlie’s delightfully complicated birth. They had never found a cause, but they had never ruled out murder either. Some years later, they closed the case without a single shred of conclusive evidence. Zephyr received a clipping of the article in the mail, in an envelope with no return address or postage mark. He thanked Lilith for the spurt of information; she played dumb on the matter, the mark of a genuine sociopath.
“You make the decisions that will turn you into a strong man. Study hard. Find a sweet girl. You’re welcome to come home anytime you want, even if it’s just to have dinner with your old pop. Or to wash laundry. I swear I’ll leave you your privacy if you allow me only a sliver of your time once in awhile. You can
always
call me.”

“
And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and the world lay spread before me,” Dickens quoted himself in jovial remembrance from between his half-charred and tattered pages. Yet another
Charles
that continued to occupy the blubbering head space of Zephyr. He paid little attention to the dead British writer, but they chatted on occasion. “And might we dare to wish you a pleasant journey, Miss Lilith and Mister Charlie! To say the least, you will be missed dearly. I speak for us all.” The other authors mumbled and chattered amongst themselves in quiet regard of this statement.

Charlie did not respond to Dickens.

“
I love you, son,” Zephyr stated between bloated sobs, reaching his arms around his boy in an awkward, unwelcome hug.

“
Get your fucking hands off me,” Charlie moaned, pulling away from his pathetic excuse for a role model. Weeping was a deplorable human characteristic. How had he been so cursed by such a sopping dandy? His stomach turned at the thought, and Lilith whispered inside of his ear. Charlie grinned, repeating her request aloud, “She said you’re a worthless bag of bones.” Charlie chuckled to himself, a sinister tint to his eyes, halfway translucent.

“
Oh, Lilith,” Zephyr mouthed, a disappointed look upon his face.

“
And she says you were her favorite lover, that she has missed you all these years,
inside of her
,” Charlie stated, pausing for another earful. “She said we’ll bring home a woman that will make my birth mother look like a whorish piece of trash.”

“
Language!” griped Zephyr, reaching for his son who continued to pull away, backing out the door with his hand upon the brass knob. Charlie shook his head from side to side.

“
Stay put, old man. This is where you belong.”

“
Please don’t go,” Zephyr cried out, his face now bursting with fat tears.

And with that, Zephyr was alone, the door slamming shut in his face. His boy was off to take over the world, to find a woman that he may continue his lineage with, as Zephyr had before him. Life was funny that way, in repeating like a broken record through the annals of time, stopping only long enough to take a breather, to drink a martini at sunset or dance with wild eyes beneath the bleeding moon. He prayed for his son to be taken care of by his new mother, that she would not corrupt him with her insatiable madness and horrific desires.

“
Just you and me now,” he said to Dickens, who had finally fallen silent after almost twenty years. He awaited a response, but received nothing. “Charles?” he queried the morning air, sensing a freedom that he could have never imagined in previous years. Freedom from nagging. Freedom from guilt. Freedom from the pestering mouths of mankind, from the subtle rapists who prowled the streets in search of innocence that may be fully terrified and forever exploited.

He considered walking to the kitchen, to bake cookies, for they always comforted his soul when something felt askew. Starting in that direction, he paused, turning towards the front door of his home.

Pushing through the screen door, he felt a sense of déjà vu sweeping over his body.

The morning’s air filled his lungs.

He thought of Jackie standing out on the rainy dew-coated front lawn. She was smiling at him. How he wanted to smell her hair. To breathe in her scent. To kiss her on her gentle cheek. To hold her hand, if nothing else. But Jackie was nowhere to be found. He could barely remember what she looked like now, and that brought a new batch of tears to his eyes. He had not even a photograph of Jackie.

At the end of his driveway, Charlie turned his pickup truck on to the road without even a complimentary honk for his father. He was off to take on the planet, to impregnate it with his love and passion, and so there was very little need to look backwards ever again. Zephyr waved at him, wishing that the boy would return soon, to let him know that all was right with his world. They would both become older, soon enough. The pain in that was unbearable and Zephyr started to wipe away the torrent of tears as best he could, embarrassed for being such a silly old (having only just crossed into his forties, but feeling quite ancient, all the same) man. The rapists of the world would laugh and point if they saw his weakness, on display, though he was by himself. He wondered, too, what Charles Dickens might have said about such a soppy waste of vital moisture.

Zephyr stepped from his house, wandering down the islands of stones.

He started to miss his son. He started to miss Lilith.

Pausing at the last cobblestone, Zephyr stared at the end of the driveway. It was Sunday, so there would be no mail. Perhaps tomorrow, good news would find its way through his mail slot.
Zephyr turned away from the world and returned to his home.

BIOGRAPHY

Eric Dimbleby
lives in Maine with his wife and children. He has been writing for more than 15 years, but finally decided to start publishing his work a year ago. In that time, he has been published in more than a dozen anthologies and is hard at work on several new novels and novellas. His novel “A Beast In Spring” will be available in e-book formats in the summer of 2011. For more information on his collected works, visit his website at www.ericdimbleby.com.