The Darker Side

  Whatever he wants, it can’t be as bad as that was. Nothing could be that bad.

  “Here’s the deal. You’re going to whip out your tiny little dick and you’re going to make the retard suck on it. I want him to choke on that Oscar Mayer.” Mark smiled, another lazy, happy, unconflicted smile. “He sucks and you come, fuckwit. No come, and you’re getting the thumbs again.” He wiggled said thumbs and grinned wider.

  Dexter would wonder, years later, how guys like Mark knew exactly where to stick the knife in so that it would hurt the most. It was an uncanny ability, like a shark smelling blood in the water.

  Dexter wasn’t a perfect boy, but he tried to be a good boy. He had his moments of anger and selfishness, but up until that moment, he’d never done anything truly ugly. He’d never taken his rage out on someone weaker than him, he’d never harmed a defenseless animal, his lies were white and not big. Somehow, Mark knew this. He wanted to change this because he knew it would hurt Dexter a lot more than gobbling Mark’s toe-jam or writhing under Mark’s iron thumbs.

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Keep licking, retard!” Mark snapped down at Jacob. He turned the sleepy gaze and the lizard smile back to Dexter. “I’ll make you scream, fag-boy. I’ll make you scream until you lose your fucking mind.”

  Dexter fought his fear. He allowed himself that truth, when he remembered this day in later years. He tried. But courage in the face of torture, he found out that day, was for comics, not eleven-year-old boys being offered a way out.

  He stood up and walked over to where Mark was. He looked down at Jacob, who had stopped crying so much. He was still licking Mark’s feet, which were starting to look pretty clean.

  Good job! Dexter thought, on the edge of hysteria.

  Jacob stopped for a moment and looked up at Dexter. The boy really did have beautiful skin. He had the eyes of a child; big and trusting. He had snot running from his nose and his cheeks were tracked with tears.

  “Now before you make him suck, I want you to slap his face,” Mark said. The bully’s voice was languid, lazy.

  Don’t do this, a voice in Dexter’s head boomed. This is something, if you do, you can’t undo.

  Dexter couldn’t take his eyes off Jacob’s face. His round, stupid face. He felt anger rising, an irrational anger that said it was Jacob’s fault that Dexter was in this position, that it was Jacob’s fault that Dexter was being forced to do something so terrible.

  If you weren’t such a fucking retard, you wouldn’t be here and I wouldn’t be here and I’d just be taking my walk on a great Saturday morning.

  Rage rose in Dexter. He’d realize later that the rage was really just fear and shame come together.

  He pulled his hand back. It hung in the air, trembling.

  “Do it, fag,” Mark goaded, gloating like a toad.

  Dexter was in hell.

  He closed his eyes so he couldn’t see Jacob’s face anymore. He hugged the rage to him, hard, and brought his hand down.

  23

  “I SLAPPED THAT POOR BOY, AND I…DID WHAT MARK TOLD me to do, and I watched as Mark threatened him after,” the man on the video continues to read. “He told Jacob he’d kill him if he finked, and that afterward, he’d fuck Jacob’s mom in the ass.

  “That was the end of my childhood Saturdays. I tried waking up again in those quiet hours, but the cartoons seemed washed out, and the cinnamon toast never tasted as good.

  “I never felt the same about myself after that. You have ideas about yourself, particularly as a child. Ideals. You assume that you’d be courageous when needed, that you’d make the right decision in a tough situation. Mark shattered that illusion for me. I realized that I was capable of harming, even raping, another person—a helpless person—to save my own skin. I wasn’t heroic when the chips were down, and whatever else happens, I’ll always know that about myself.

  “I told Nana about what happened. I told her and I cried and she held me for a long time. She was quiet for a while, thinking through it in that way that she had. In the end she told me this: ‘Everyone has a little bit of ugly in them. Remember yours the next time you think about judging theirs.’

  “Nana was the only one who knew, until this year. I found a priest, a good man, who was willing to hear my confession. I talked, he listened, and then, miracle of miracles, he absolved me. He told me that God would forgive, and I believe him. God, I am finding, is not really the problem. I’m just not sure if I’m ready to forgive myself.

  “But I’m trying. I really, really am.”

  The man puts the page down on the table in front of him and refolds his hands, thumb and forefinger still rubbing away at the rosary.

  “So Dexter Reid revealed one secret to the world, his desire to be a woman. But he held one back, something even more shameful, perhaps. Certainly more shameful to him. As they say, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. Easy to say, difficult to do, necessary for salvation. Another example follows in the death of Rosemary Sonnenfeld.”

  The clip fades to black.

  “Is the bad feeling I’m getting justified?” I ask Alan.

  “Yeah.”

  “Go ahead.”

  He clicks the next clip. The lettering this time reads: The Death and Sin of Rosemary Sonnenfeld.

  “Rosemary was a sinner’s sinner,” the man intones. He doesn’t sound especially judgmental about it. Just telling it like it is. “She spent her youth having sex indiscriminately and for money, embroiled in drugs and perversion. At her lowest point she accepted God into her life and confessed her past to Him. She revealed her secrets and tried to walk a righteous path. But, as with Dexter, she had a second secret, a deeper sin. Observe.”

  The clip cuts to a woman, her face hovering above a pile of cocaine, straw in hand. She’s naked and shaking. The sound of her snorting coincides with the pile getting noticeably smaller. I recognize the woman as Rosemary.

  “Again,” a voice commands. It’s the man who’s been narrating the clips so far.

  Rosemary looks up. Her eyes are a little unfocused, but I can see the fear in them.

  “If I keep snorting, I’ll die,” she says.

  “Indeed,” the man replies. “But if you don’t, I’ll shoot off your kneecaps and cut off your breasts. You’ll still die, but it will be far more painful.” A pause. “So, again.”

  A look of resignation crosses her face. She bends over the pile and takes a huge snort. It seems to go on forever. The straw falls from her fingers, and her head snaps back, eyes fluttering, hair trailing down her back. It’s a kind of hideous art, the aesthetics of death and death to come.

  “Lay back now,” the man says, his voice soothing. “Lay back, my child.”

  A gloved hand comes into view and he pushes her shivering, shaking body back onto the bed. She’s smiling, biting her lower lip. Fine drops of sweat bead her brow. She’s the picture of a woman in the throes of something ecstatic and wonderful. She clenches her upper thighs together again and again, as though she’s fighting an orgasm.

  “Tell us about Dylan, Rosemary.”

  The clenching stops and she seems to find some focus. She frowns and then shudders. She’s started to sweat.

  “H-how d-do you know…? H-how? Only told people at my…”

  “I know, Rosemary,” he interrupts. “You’re dying. Go to meet God with the truth on your lips. Tell us about Dylan. He was your brother, wasn’t he?”

  “Y-yes. Brother. Beautiful brother.”

  “How old was Dylan?”

  She spasms once and she closes her eyes.

  “Thirteen,” she hisses.

  “And how old were you?”

  “Fifteen fifteen fif-fif-fifteen,” she says in a singsong.

  “Tell us, Rosemary. Tell us, tell them, tell God, what it was you did to beautiful Dylan.”

  A long pause, and now she’s really trembling. Her breathing is getting shallower and faster.

  Not much time now, I think.

  “I came i
nto his bed one night and I sucked his cock!” she crows. “Sucked him and he couldn’t help but let me. And then I got him hard again and fucked him.”

  “And what happened the next day, Rosemary?”

  Silence. Spasms. Sweat.

  “What happened the next day?”

  She shakes her head back and forth, back and forth.

  “No no no no no no no.”

  “God is love, Rosemary.”

  These words bring a change upon her that I don’t quite understand. She begins to weep.

  “He killed himself. He went into the bathroom and cut his wrists and he didn’t leave a note because he knew I’d know why. No one else ever knew, not Mom, not Dad, but I knew I knew I knew. The evil hungry in me had killed sweet Dylan, had made him do bad against his will, had eaten him alive. The evil hungry had killed him dead.”

  I grimace at the pain in her voice, and at the idea of someone having a name for something about themselves that they despised. The evil hungry.

  “Very good, Rosemary,” the man says, and I’m surprised at the depth of compassion apparent in his voice. He actually seems to care. “I’m going to give you peace now, I’m going to send you home to God. Would you like that?”

  She begins to recite the Lord’s Prayer.

  “Our Father, Who art in heaven.”

  A long, metal rod with a sharp and pointed end appears in the camera view.

  “Hallowed be Thy name,” he answers.

  The film cuts back to the man seated at the table. Just as well. I know what happened next. He stuck her in the side, angled the point up and into her heart, delivering the quick death he’d promised.

  “Again, you see? One secret, revealed, hides the other, unrevealed. Truth is not a striving, it is an immediate arrival.”

  For the first time, his body language changes. He places the rosary to one side of the table and lays his palms flat on the surface.

  “I have spent my life building up to this moment, preparing for this reveal. I haven’t done this for myself. I haven’t done this because I enjoy killing.”

  “Right,” Callie says, sardonic.

  “I have taken this time to build an absolute, airtight, irrefutable case for truth. Because the most basic truth is this: live with lies, live in sin, and you will deny yourself the fruits of heaven. Live with the truth, confess your sins, hold nothing back, and you will sit at the right hand of God when you die. It is that simple. It requires no debate or endless figuring. What it does require is operation at the level of an absolute.

  “We love our little sins. The secrets we hold for ourselves, sometimes they are the only things we have that we can truly call our own. I understand this. I know life can be hard. The mother who is working three jobs and raising four children on her own sneaks off for an hour affair with a married man. It gives her a rush of life and excitement and a stolen, momentary sense of freedom that perhaps she feels she might die without. Sin can be as water in the desert sometimes.

  “The truth remains: she can work those jobs, raise her children well, live a life that is otherwise clear of wrongfulness, but if she dies without full and unfettered confession of that sin, she will not arrive in heaven.

  “So ask yourself: are those stolen moments worth an eternity?

  “I have spent two decades killing, not for the thrill of it, but so that I could arrive here and now and share with you the truth of what I have seen. I selected my sacrifices carefully, as you will see. Each had a secret, a darkness, something they could not reveal. All now sit at the right hand of God and enjoy the wonders of heaven. In the end, they gave their lives so that you could understand. Not willing martyrs, but martyrs nonetheless.

  “I am no messiah. There has been only one messiah—Jesus Christ, the son of God. But I humbly submit that I am a prophet for the modern age. We are living in times that are drenched in sin. Godlessness is almost a given. If you are watching this, listening to what I say, then it’s time to wake up. There is good and there is evil. There is a God. There is a heaven and there is a hell. The road to heaven is a road of absolute truth. The road to hell is a road of lies, of non-revelation, of holding tight to those treasured secrets. Which road will you take?

  “If you choose the road to heaven, then watch the rest of my movies, and listen. Perhaps you’ll see your own sin revealed by others. Perhaps you’ll come to terms with that great and simple truth: the worst thing that you have done can still be forgiven by God. You just have to ask him.

  “Twenty years ago, I realized that sharing this truth with the world was what God had called on me to do. Sin is omnipresent. We begin to sin from the moment we are born. But if you are watching this, understand: you can be saved, so long as you admit all to God and hold back nothing for yourself.

  “Some will ask how I can justify murder. I answer simply that murder is not what has happened on these video clips. Sacrifice is what has happened. They confessed their sins to me, they were contrite, and thus all will have been allowed into heaven. Consider the facts—many in history have said before what I am saying now. Yet people do not listen. They continue to clutch their secrets close. They hear the words, but they do not feel them in their hearts.

  “Words, it seems, are not enough. Man, it appears, needs to see his fellows weep, and bleed, and die. He needs to hear the dark secrets of others, to realize, perhaps, that he is not alone, that others have done terrible things as well. Those I sacrificed were given up to God so that I could make certain, this time, that you would listen and hear and feel this primary truth: be honest with God and achieve eternal salvation; hold back the smallest thing and burn in hellfire forever.”

  These last words had come out in a rush, a quiet thunder, passionate. This is it, I think. Why he does what he does. Or at least, why he thinks he does what he does.

  He’s been building a case for truth before God. The deaths were necessary to proving this ideal and were justified by the potential salvation of others who’d watch and learn the lessons he was trying to teach. He didn’t have to feel guilty. They’d confessed, right? That meant he was sending them to a better place. Heck, he was doing them a favor.

  What a crock of shit. What about Ambrose? How had he justified killing him?

  Psychotics, however brilliant, will always have blind spots. Their systems of rationalization, however logical at first glance, can never hide the basic motivation: they enjoy the suffering and death of others.

  He picks up the rosary again, and begins rubbing the beads.

  “I offer myself as a final demonstration of the tenets I espouse. To the members of law enforcement who will watch this: everything you need to know to find me is on these and the other tapes. Everything. But you will have to be clear-minded. You will have to have the ability to see the truth. Practice what I preach and you will find me standing right in front of you. Hold on to your lies, keep the veil over your eyes, and it will take you that much longer. In this case, time is life, Officers and Agents.

  “I am not done. I have names on a list, and I have put things into motion to bring them first to me and then to the right hand of God. I will kill again in the next two days, and this time, it will be a child.”

  “Shit,” Alan breathes.

  That frozen moment again. The world stops turning, the cicadas return. I have no doubt that he’s telling us the truth, even less that he’ll keep his promise.

  “That’s all for now. I realize in this day and age I’ll be given a nom de plume of some kind. I don’t want someone’s clever creation to distract from the purpose of my message. So let’s agree to keep it simple: you can call me the Preacher.”

  Fade to black.

  Everyone’s quiet.

  “The Preacher,” Callie finally says, with a little bit of a sneer. “What an overblown ego.”

  “Rosemary said she ‘only told the people in my…’ In her what?” I ask.

  “Church?” Alan posits.

  I frown. “That wouldn’t make much sense. Di
d you see her face? Zero recognition. She had no idea who this guy was. It’s a small church, with a tight-knit congregation.”

  “Puts Father Yates in the clear,” Alan points out. “But how about a support group?”

  “What, like Coke Fiends Anonymous?” Callie asks.

  “It’d be a bigger collection of people. Harder to remember a face that way.”

  “It’s a thought,” I agree.

  “Shitty thought.” Alan sighs. “I’ve had to follow leads into groups like that before. It sucks. They take the ‘anonymous’ idea pretty seriously.”

  “Still, let’s keep it in mind. What about the rest of the clips?”

  “I haven’t viewed any past this last one,” he says, “but it looks like he’s been true to his word. There are another six clips or so on this page, and then…” He clicks on a link that says Next Page and a new page loads into the browser, filled with thumbnails of clips. “If you look, you’ll see that the information on each clip includes the author. These are all him.”

  I lean forward and sure enough I see Author: The Preacher below each thumbnail. I examine the thumbnails themselves. They are a mix of images. Some simply have a black screen, others have the now familiar white lettering he uses for his “opening credits.” Some show women, young and old. Some look dead, some appear terrified, a few have gags tied around their mouths. There’s no recognizable victim type here.

  “How many thumbnails to a page?” I ask.

  “Ten rows of five,” Alan replies.

  “How many pages?” I dread the answer.

  “Almost three.”

  “So if each is a separate victim,” Callie muses, “then the numbers on the crosses he left in Lisa Reid and Rosemary Sonnenfeld were a body count, after all.”

  “There’s another problem,” Alan says. He navigates back to the front page of the religious section of the website. “These make it to the front page based on popularity. In other words, the number of times they’re viewed.”

  “Great,” I mutter. “And I’ll assume that there’s an overall popularity index too, right?”